A PhD is thought to be the pinnacle of human academic endeavor, in which someone pushes the boundary of human knowledge in a very narrow domain. But OpenAI’s former CTO believes that AI systems are already capable of this level of performance.
Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati has said that AI systems are already at the PhD level in several fields. “This year, we have systems that are capable of PhD level performance in many different domains,” she said in an interview. “And before that we had college level performance. And just a couple of years before that we had high school level performance. So if you just look at this trend and extrapolate it out — it’s not for certain — but it shows that progress will likely continue. And it’s not unreasonable that in a very short time, we could get to a system that has the capability to learn how to perform at human level across basically all cognitive tasks,” she added.
Murati said that such a system could be called AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence. “I define AGI as a system that is capable of learning how to perform at human level across all cognitive tasks. And right now, this feels, I would say, quite achievable. Even if it’s not something that happens within a couple of years, it will take perhaps a decade, maybe two. I don’t know, but it feels achievable. Whereas I’d say, you know, even six years ago, to me, it felt more (like) science fiction,” Murati added.
Murati, though, acknowledged that she’d been working at OpenAI since 2018 with an aim of achieving AGI, even though the goal seemed far-fetched at the time. “Even though I was inspired and we believed in this, what you call a spiritual mission and common vision, it still felt quite sci-fi at the time. Whereas now we’ve made enough progress that we can kind of see how the technology evolves,” she added.
Murati had joined OpenAI as its 2018 as its VP of Applied AI and Partnerships, and was promoted to its Chief Technology Officer in 2022. She was OpenAI’s CTO when it had released ChatGPT, which ushered in the current AI revolution. Murati, however, had quit OpenAI earlier this year, and could be preparing a launch a new venture. And given how she had a ringside view of all developments at OpenAI and likely understands its product roadmap as well, her confidence in humanity ultimately achieving AGI is yet another sign that AGI could well be somewhere around the corner.