It isn’t often that researchers at the cutting edge of technology see something that blows their minds. But that’s exactly what happened in 2023, when AI experts began interacting with GPT-4, a large language model (LLM) created by researchers at OpenAI that was trained at unprecedented scale. “I saw some mind-blowing capabilities that I thought I wouldn’t see for many years,” said Ece Kamar, partner research manager at Microsoft, during a podcast recorded in April. Throughout the year, rapid advances in AI came to dominate the public conversation(opens in new tab), as technology leaders and eventually the general public voiced a mix of wonder and skepticism after experimenting with GPT-4 and related applications. Could we be seeing sparks of artificial general intelligence(opens in new tab)—informally defined as AI systems that “demonstrate broad capabilities of intelligence, including reasoning, planning, and the ability to learn from experience(opens in new tab)”?