This week, OpenAI introduced a five-level system for tracking progress towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The move comes as major AI labs increasingly talk of the next threshold of AI capabilities alongside safety considerations. OpenAI’s structure gives us a glimpse of the step-change new models might bring, and how we can think of future AI systems.
The new framework categorises AI into five levels: chatbots, reasoners, agents, innovators, and organisations. The company claims to be approaching Level 2, ‘reasoners’, which represents AI systems capable of human-level problem-solving equivalent to someone with a PhD-level education.
Level 3, ‘agents’, refers to AI systems that can work on tasks for several days on a user’s behalf. Level 4, ‘innovators’, describes AI capable of generating new innovations. The final level, ‘organisations’, suggests the ambition for AI systems that can perform the work of entire organisations. This roadmap hints at the potential capabilities of future AI models like GPT-5, and beyond that point, the potential for models to go beyond the boundaries of a single human equivalent to a more collective scale of intelligence.
While OpenAI’s scale focuses on capability, Anthropic uses a different approach. Their AI Safety Level (ASL) system, which ranges from ASL-1 to ASL-5+, emphasises safety measures and containment protocols required for models of increasing capability. Claude 3.5 Opus, Anthropic’s next frontier model, slated to come later this year, may well be pushing the boundaries of these classifications. If 3.5 Sonnet is anything to go by, its advanced reasoning abilities could be approaching ASL-3, which is characterised by “low-level autonomous capabilities”, as well as perhaps OpenAI’s level 2 ‘reasoners’ stage or beyond.
Takeaways: AI scales become more meaningful as we move through the gears. Businesses should view them as strategic tools for understanding the AI landscape and experimenting with future innovations in mind. These scales could also be enriched to support the kinds of financial projection we cover in this week’s newsletter, providing a more structured basis for understanding AI’s potential.