On Lawfare, Kevin Frazier, Alan Z. Rozenshtein, and Peter N. Salib have a report on a jump forward in generative AI:
OpenAI’s Latest Model Shows AGI Is Inevitable. Now What?
Last week, on the last of its “12 Days of OpenAI,” OpenAI unveiled the o3 model for further testing and, eventually, public release. In doing so, the company upended the narrative that leading labs had hit a plateau in AI development. o3 achieved what many thought impossible: scoring 87.5 percent on the ARC-AGI benchmark, which is designed to test genuine intelligence (human performance is benchmarked at 85 percent). To appreciate the magnitude of this leap, consider that it took four years for AI models to progress from zero percent in 2020 to five percent earlier in 2024. Then, in a matter of months, o3 shattered all previous limitations.
This isn’t just another AI milestone to add to a growing list. The ARC-AGI benchmark was specifically designed to test what many consider the essence of general intelligence: the ability to recognize patterns in novel situations and adapt knowledge to unfamiliar challenges. Previous language models, despite their impressive capabilities, struggled on some tasks like solving certain math problems—including ones that humans find very easy. o3 fundamentally breaks this barrier, demonstrating an ability to synthesize new programs and approaches on the fly—a crucial stepping stone toward artificial general intelligence (AGI).
The implications are profound and urgent. We are witnessing not just incremental progress but a fundamental shift in AI capabilities. The question is no longer whether we will achieve AGI, but when—and more importantly, how we will manage its arrival. This reality demands an immediate recalibration of policy discussions. We can no longer afford to treat AGI as a speculative possibility that may or may not arrive at some undefined point in the future. The time has come to treat AGI as an inevitability and focus the Hill’s regulatory energy on ensuring its development benefits humanity as a whole.
Oddly enough, while the word exponential gets a bit of use in this article, generally in the context of human lack of intuitive comprehension of the implications of exponential growth, there is neither mention of the decades of near-zero progress in AI capabilities, despite predictions, nor is there mention of the hypothetical singularity, which is the time when exponential technological advancement, if graphed against time, becomes approximately vertical, and irreversible. Nor do they mention the Mechanical Turk, an infamous fraud.
But then, the point of the article was creation of regulatory frameworks in order to keep how AI disturbs society orderly.
If o3 is marginally beyond human intelligence at 87.5%, I gotta wonder what it takes to make 100% – and where it scores if it accomplishes the destruction of its makers.
