OpenAI President Greg Brockman has given details about the upcoming AI model from the ChatGPT maker called ‘Spud’. In a recent podcast appearance, Brockman called it a culmination of nearly two years of research from the company and a key step towards pushing for artificial general intelligence (AGI).
In a recent appearance on the Big Technology podcast, Brockman said Spud will represent a new base model for ChatGPT and will serve as the foundation on which future models will be built rather than being just an incremental upgrade.
“I think of Spud as a new base (model), as a new pre-train… we have maybe two years’ worth of research that is coming to fruition in this model,” Brockman said.
What will Spud model offer?
Notably, the news about the Spud AI model came to the fore via a report by The Information last week, which noted that OpenAI is preparing to reveal the model in the next few weeks, and CEO Sam Altman has also told his staff that the model “can really accelerate the economy.”
During his recent podcast appearance, Brockman not only confirmed the existence of Spud but stopped just short of detailing benchmarks or release timelines for the model. Brockman noted that Spud has a ‘big model feel’ and will deliver noticeable improvements in capability and usability.
Speaking on the podcast, the OpenAI President said, “I think it’s going to be able to solve both much harder problems. I think it will be much more nuanced. It’ll understand instructions better. It’ll understand the context much better. There’s this thing called big model smell that people talk about, where it’s just like there’s something about when these models are actually much smarter, much more capable, that they bend to you much more.”
“There will just be new things where you would be frustrated before, you would never use an AI for it, and now you just use it without thinking very much. I think that is what we’re going to see across the board. I’m super excited to see how it raises the ceiling,” Brockman added.
OpenAI’s push for AGI:
During his recent podcast appearance, Brockman also said that OpenAI now has a “line of sight” to AGI and believes it could arrive within the next few years.
“I think it’s extremely clear that we are going to have AGI within the next couple years in a way that is still going to be jagged, but that the floor of tasks will just be almost for any intellectual task. For how you use your computer, the AI will be able to do that,” Brockman said.
