It's looking increasingly likely that an AI model called QUALIA or Q* may indeed be related to the bizarre firing and re-hiring of Sam Altman at OpenAI.
Q* is not the only theory that attempts to explain the OpenAI coup attempt. Another theory is that the board of the non-profit OpenAI was compromised by having financial interests in competitors to OpenAI such as Anthropic. Firing Altman and attempting to essentially destroy or weaken OpenAI could plausibly have been an attempt to self-interestedly pump Anthropic and all of the rest of OpenAI competitors.
But rumors and some more solid information about Q* is slowly trickling out. Some of the scoop is more trustworthy and reported by more reputable outlets like Reuters, and some information has been allegedly leaked on much less reputable forums like 4chan. Although 4chan is a cess pit of lies and misinformation, 4chan has already earned a place in the dissemination and advancement of AI knowledge and practice, since that was the forum where the weights for the Llama model were originally leaked.
What we know for sure is that Q* is an AI model that has seemed particularly successful at lower level (grade school) math and has been given a lot of compute at OpenAI. What is speculation is that Q* turns out to be really, really good at math, better than any LLM (large language model, e.g. ChatGPT) has ever been. (LLMs have so far been really terrible at math). Q* also allegedly displays the property of "meta-cognigiton" which is the ability to think about its own thinking. It supposedly has the ability to apply its learnings from one subject to another, much in the way that AlphaZero was able to apply its super-human skill from one game to another. AlphaZero is not an LLM, and no LLM has ever displayed this property of meta-cognition before. AlphaZero, athough super-human in the domain of certain games, has no ability to read papers about the architecture of itself.
Meta-cognition is an active area of research. If an LLM truly had the ability to think about its own thinking, and combine it with a deep knowledge of math, that means, in theory, it could read papers about machine learning (i.e. math), and speculate how its own architecture could be improved, beginning the feedback loop that could lead to exponential improvements on the path toward AGI (artificial general intelligence) and the "Singularity".
And, allegedly, that's exactly what Q* has already done, having already suggested changes to its own architecture, changes that no human fully understands. And, according to this theory, somebody got spooked and felt they needed to pull the plug.
There is one other extremely speculative theory that caught my interest. Supposedly Q* has displayed the ability to crack certain forms of strong encryption. I'm not sure how this could be possible since math is math and it seems like it's extremely unlikely for any entity based on classical computers to crack strong encryption no matter how super-intelligent it is. But I suppose it could be theoretically possible that it has found novel solutions to decryption problems that human cryptographers have not discovered yet. If so, this has huge implications in terms of our entire architecture of computer security as we know it. And we are now in the realm of national security interest, which could help explain the why the OpenAI board was not forthcoming with its reasoning.
