OpenAI and Meta are on the brink of releasing new artificial intelligence models that they say will be capable of reasoning and planning, critical steps towards achieving superhuman cognition in machines.
Executives at OpenAI and Meta both signalled this week that they were preparing to launch the next versions of their large language models, the systems that power generative AI applications such as ChatGPT.
Meta said it would begin rolling out Llama 3 in the coming weeks, while Microsoft-backed OpenAI indicated that its next model, expected to be called GPT-5, was coming “soon”.
We are hard at work in figuring out how to get these models not just to talk, but actually to reason, to plan ... to have memory.
– Joelle Pineau, Vice-president of AI research at Meta
OpenAI’s chief operating officer Brad Lightcap told the Financial Times that the next generation of GPT would show progress on solving “hard problems” such as reasoning.
We’re going to start to see AI that can take on more complex tasks in a more sophisticated way. I think we’re just starting to scratch the surface on the ability that these models have to reason.
– Brad Lightcap, Chief operating officer at OpenAI
Today’s AI systems are “really good at one-off small tasks”, Lightcap added, but were still “pretty narrow” in their capabilities.
Meta and OpenAI’s upgrades are part of a wave of new large language models being released this year by companies including Google, Anthropic and Cohere.
As tech companies race to create ever more sophisticated generative AI — software that can create humanlike words, images, code and video of quality indistinguishable from human output — the pace of progress is accelerating.
Reasoning and planning are important steps towards what AI researchers call “artificial general intelligence” — human-level cognition — because they allow chatbots and virtual assistants to complete sequences of related tasks and predict the consequences of their actions.
