AI has started to display ‘compounding exponential’ progress, founder of ChatGPT rival claims

Boss of ChatGPT rival says ‘next few years will yield progress that intuitively feels nuts’

A leading AI researcher has claimed that artificial intelligence is starting to develop beyond an exponential rate.

Jack Clark, who co-founded AI research startup Anthropic after spending four years at OpenAI, said that he believed the exponential progress over the last decade has now transitioned to a new level whereby huge advances will occur extremely quickly.

“A mental model I have of AI is it was roughly ~linear progress from 1960s-2010, then exponential 2010-2020s, then has started to display ‘compounding exponential’ properties in 2021/22 onwards,” he wrote in a Twitter thread.

“In other words, next few years will yield progress that intuitively feels nuts.”

Mr Clark said he believed there is “pretty good evidence for the extreme part” of his claim, citing recent advances in language models and the increased amount of economic utility of such systems.

He added: “How I’m trying to be in 2023 is ‘mask off’ about what I think about all this stuff, because I think we have a very tiny sliver of time to do various things to set us all up for more success, and I think information asymmetries have a great record of messing things up.”

Anthropic is currently developing a chatbot similar to OpenAI’s hugely popular ChatGPT, which uses generativeAI to offer human-like responses to a vast range of queries.

Anthropic’s Claude AI recently achieved a passing grade in university law and economics exam, with one professor describing it as “better than many human” candidates.

In a recent test of the two AI bots, researchers noted: “Overall, Claude is a serious competitor to ChatGPT, with improvements in many areas.

“Claude’s writing is more verbose, but also more naturalistic. Its ability to write coherently about itself, its limitations, and its goals seem to also allow it to more naturally answer questions on other subjects. For other tasks, like code generation or reasoning about code, Claude appears to be worse.”

Despite the hype surrounding generative AI and natural language models, OpenAI boss Sam Altman has claimed that the technology is currently “incredibly limited” and gives a “misleading impression of greatness”.