Sparks of AGI: early experiments with GPT-4
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as a thought-provoking talk from a researcher with early GPT-4 access, especially for the unicorn degrading under safety tuning.
What it is
Sebastien Bubeck presents the Sparks of AGI paper at MIT, showing early experiments with GPT-4 across many domains and asking whether artificial intelligence has arrived. It includes the TikZ unicorn example.
Recommended by 7 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2023 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec lhl · 2023-04 · on “The LLama Effect: Leak Sparked a Series of Open Source Alternatives to ChatGPT”
If you (or anyone else is) interested in the topic, I'd highly recommend giving some of these a look: Bubeck, Sébastien, Varun Chandrasekaran, Ronen Eldan, Johannes Gehrke, Eric Horvitz, Ece Kamar, Peter Lee, et al. “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early Experiments with GPT-4.” arXiv, March 27, 2023. [LINK] . or watching Sebastien Bubeck's recent talk he gave describing what GPT-4 can do that previous LLMs couldn't: [this video] Geoffrey Hinton recently gave a very interesting interview and he specifically wanted to address the "auto-complete" topic: [LINK] Here's another way that Ilya Sutskever recently described it (comparing GPT 4 to 3): [LINK] I'd also recommend this recent Sam Bo
Strong rec iamflimflam1 · 2023-04 · on “What GPT-4 Does Is Less Like “Figuring Out” and More Like “Already Knowing””
I used to say this as well, I’ve written blog posts and made videos saying exactly this. But - I would strongly recommend trying GPT4. There’s a very good video that is worth watching as well that may not change your mind, but will certainly make you think: [this video] The thing to remember is that these models are unbelievably huge and deep. We don’t know what is really happening in the layers or what it has really learned. Thinking that it’s a simple language model that is just predicting the next most likely word is unwise.
Strong rec neom · 2023-05 · on “ChatGPT Egg Balancing Task Convinced Microsoft That AGI Is Closer”
Highly highly highly recommend listen to this lecture by Sebastien Bubeck (the dude who wrote the paper), it's extremely interesting: [this video]
Strong rec Topfi · 2025-10 · on “Gemini 3.0 spotted in the wild through A/B testing”
It goes back to Sparks of AGI [0] unless I am mistaken. Can recommend the talk, one that has stayed in the back of my mind since I first saw it two years ago. Personally, still have major reservations about throwing claims of intelligence or understanding around, but I do agree that SVG code generation can be a very effective source to get a quick and easy to present understanding of a models ability to output code with a rather open ended prompt that needs a high degree of coherence and were a lot of layers depend/build on each other. Helps that these are eye catching (literally as the output is visual) and easy to grasp. Same reason a lot of hype is created around the web desktops. [0] [VI
Recommends ftxbro · 2023-05 · on “The AI revolution is powered by these contractors making $15 an hour”
Here are two. First one is Nathan Labenz who ended up Red Teaming for OpenAI during the six months after the base model was fully trained but before it was released (especially relevant parts are after 45 minutes): [LINK] Other one is Sebastien Bubeck who put Sydney into Bing before she was tamed down some notches; he explains the lobotomization process in a particularly poignant way, where they had the GPT keep trying to draw a unicorn even as it was progressively deadened: [this video]
Recommends pmoriarty · 2023-05 · on “LLMs are not greater than the sum of their parts: Stanford researchers”
You might find this video[1] on why "GPT is smarter than you think" interesting. They're older, but the "Sparks of AGI" paper[2] and video[3] are also well worth your time. [1] - [LINK] [2] - [LINK] [3] - [this video]
Recommends nazka · 2023-06 · on “GPT4 Can’t Ace MIT”
You should take a look at this video. He is a researcher at Microsoft and had accès to private version of ChatGPT. He literally claims that ChatGPT 4 is not as good as before. His talk actually demonstrates the different evolutions. [this video]
Cites adnmcq999 · 2023-04 · on “Teaching ChatGPT to Speak My Son’s Invented Language”
I just watched a video where the guy touches on GPT-4 limitations and one of those is simple math. He asks it some order of operations question and it outputs the correct answer but only if it does it step by step. It then apologizes and says its original incorrect answer was “a typo.” Video: [this video]