So, what did Ilya or Mira see? If the rumors are right, the AI field is on the verge of another quantum jump, irrespective of OpenAI's actions.

The quest in "AI" since the term's arrival in the 1940s was a long journey in the search for a holy grail: the path to creating intelligence. 2022 marked the dawn of a revolution as big as the arrival of the Internet because we got the validation of a particular neural network method, the Transformer Model, being that path. This has been discussed differently in many of my posts available on www.geninnov.ai.

Many continue to see LLMs as statistical parrots, albeit complex ones. If pushed, they would admit to the generative aspects of GenAI as a novel ability to create new patterns by learning from existing ones.

Intelligence is difficult to define but easy to see. When one is teaching an infant barely to burp, and she suddenly learns how to manipulate the mother's feelings by crying in specific ways to get picked up, that is intelligence. Nobody taught her that, and this zero-shot training, in machine-speak, signifies intelligence.

If OpenAI's model Q-star has actually learned how to do the basic math, it will not just be the most incontrovertible proof that we have found the path to birth genuine machine intelligence but also be another quantum jump in the direction of machines being able to do inventions and innovations beyond human intelligence capacity. One may call this type of GenAI AGI or whatever else; all the risks being mentioned are also entirely valid, apart from their phenomenal potential.

The harsh reality is that the path towards AGI is no longer OpenAI's secret. Hundreds of labs probe the frontiers of transformer models daily. Even if OpenAI wardens off existential risk, for now, that knowledge cannot be sealed away. Other models may stumble upon it within months, if not weeks, without the same caution in play.

Of course, this speculation rests on the validity of rumors about what Ilya and his team witnessed. But if Q-star displays that spark of intelligence - grasping concepts without any human guidance - then AI will blister with advancement faster than any field in history. With understanding comes power and peril in equal measure.