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> How to think about OpenAI's rumored (and overhyped) Q* project

are rumors worth thinking about?

It's more than rumors. There's enough information out there that you can make educated guesses about what it might be, and this article seems reasonable. There's lots of reasons to be interested in future research directions that well funded AI companies are taking, and a lot of those reasons start with dollar signs.
You don't need so-called educated guesses for that. Learning to plan is not a new concept; it's a general direction in the research field, and I bet everyone is working on something related. However, it's essentially just glorified search. If you can't find a perfect answer to the problem within 1 million[0] sampled generations, then I don't think a smarter search will help you.

[0] https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/AlphaCode2/Alp...

Wether its worth it or not is a fair question, but one thing is for sure - people on social media, the internet in general (and actually just in real life too) LOVE talking and thinking about rumours.
Fresh content drives views drive $ + there will always be more rumors than facts = one can make more content (and therefore $) about rumors
If you read the article you’ll see it’s not just about rumours but about where the future of AI may be headed in general.
The fact OpenAI wants to hype something right now is probably noteworthy.
Yes. Keep in mind that, aside from their former board, they probably employ a good PR firm.
That doesn't mean there's a significant product behind it. A good PR firm can freeze attrition promising the next big thing any minute now... at least for a while. And when the product comes out and it's good enough but not amazing like their GPT hits -- attrition avoided. (Not that OpenAI has an attrition problem, but not for lack of trying by the other big players.)
I would go so far as to say it's evidence there isn't - GPT-4 doesn't need hype beyond word of mouth, Q* is clearly not in that situation.
What did you see that made you think "OpenAI wants to hype something right now"? I didn't see anything coming from them except Altman saying the leak was "unfortunate". I don't believe they are generating any of the Q* hype.
I didn’t fully read this, but superficially I don’t see a difference between this and AI explained’s recent video. Maybe it is better in text form than video for some, but it feels plagiarised given the similarities and the popularity of the AI explained channel.
I love AI Explained, but is a 200k sub channel really that influential in the industry?
I have noticed a trend with Ars posting original articles with a lot of similarities to content from smaller sources that came out a few days earlier. Its pretty common to see a rather esoteric topic make it to the front page of HN and then a similar article showing up on Ars a bit later. I assume their authors are mining HN and similar places for ideas.

Not saying that happened here or that it is ever plagiarism. Just something I noticed as a daily Ars and HN reader.

[flagged]
Has this comment been written by a procedural text generator?
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It certainly rings like one, you're not alone in thinking that
I suspect a new class of spam is emerging that is strategically placed positively or negatively sentimented text that is designed to be ingested by other LLMs about a certain topic. This spam doesn't need to be convincing to humans, just convincing to a mindless LLM that's giving an answer on the topic at some later date.
The poster has 16905 karma and has been around since 2013, though. Obviously a bona fide member of the HN community and not a spammer. (Well, unless his account was hacked.)
It is more likely a new type of joke, whereby the poster pretends to be a really bad chat robot, perhaps implying that the article itself could as well have been produced by an (equally mindless) AI system.
FWIW and as best I can tell, GPT-4 solves the 2nd, table-seating, problem without issues:

https://chat.openai.com/share/35ed608a-cd3b-4271-aa97-12784d...

The article links to an example of GPT-4 failing to solve it. It seems likely that it can only solve it sometimes and basically gets “lucky”.
This is interesting. When I started a new chat, first with the apples problem, then followed by the seating problem, GPT-4 gets it wrong.

https://chat.openai.com/share/1c04a8f6-2ed7-45bf-8e20-158f78...

That's because it's got a randomizer component at its core and only knows the statistically most likely thing to output next (still influenced by the random bits), not some logical reasoning that allows it to "understand" the question.
It's output is non-deterministic because the next word is sampled from the topN highest scored continuations. The algorithm itself is deterministic.
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I already have access to Q* via ChatGPT. Is that an OpenAI bug or an early invitation?
Tell us more. Do you notice a difference?
Regarding quality I don't know yet. If you have a specific question to compare I can give more feedback. What I know is that with other versions I can upload a zip file and its content is processed while in Q* it is not available yet.

There is a "Do not distribute" message at the end of every response but I think I can tell general things without losing the permissions to access Q*.

Assuming you are for real…Please ask some math questions. Try to determine if there are high school level calculation problems that GPT-4 gets wrong that Q* can solve.
Give me a problem that you want to test and I will feed it.
Subtract 5614 from 28104. Divide the result by 65. Then multiply by 3.

GPT-4 is giving me a close answer, but not correct. 1035.6 instead of 1038.

GPT-4 gives me the correct answer:

> The result of subtracting 5614 from 28104, dividing that result by 65, and then multiplying by 3 is 1038.

Q* gives me an incorrect answer: 1035.

The reverse you expected.

Not a bad question to ask an AGI..
What are you seeing on chatgpt which leads you to think that you have access?
I don't "think" I have access, i have access. There is a Q* tab with a specific prompt.
A tab? Can you take a screenshot? Sorry to be blunt but can you not dripfeed information?