One of Microsoft's top AI researchers has departed the company to join OpenAI. The researcher in question is the vice president of GenAI research, Sebastien Bubeck. In a statement seen by Reuters, Microsoft said that Bubeck had left to "further his work toward developing AGI."
Bubeck has not yet updated his profile on LinkedIn with his latest role starting in September 2024 at Microsoft as "VP AI and Distinguished Scientists". Given Microsoft's confirmation, however, it's certain he has left the Redmond giant's research arm.
One of Bubeck's notable contributions at Microsoft is that he co-authored a paper called "Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early Experiments with GPT-4" which looks into the capabilities and limitations of LLMs like GPT-4 and explores whether LLMs are the way forward for achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
For anybody interested in the findings of that paper, the researchers concluded that GPT-4 exhibited early signs of behaviors that resemble aspects of AGI. However, GPT-4 is still nowhere near fully autonomous or a universally intelligent system.
The AI field is red hot right now with tons of hype around generative AI in particular. It is being baked into many apps and chatbots widely available which leverage many different models. The cutting-edge models are known as frontier models and aim to break new ground.
To build these frontier models companies like OpenAI and Microsoft need the very best talent and they're attracting them with big sums of money. According to ReadWrite, many of the top researchers are earning massive salaries above $800,000 per year for the work they do.
Possibly in a bid to be in a better position to pay these wages, OpenAI has decided to transition to a fully for-profit company and remove the non-profit control. When the company started it was more idealistic but reality has come calling so a restructuring is needed.
Source: Reuters
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