When computer scientists at Microsoft started to experiment with a new artificial intelligence system last year, they asked it to solve a puzzle that should have required an intuitive understanding of the physical world. "Here we have a book, nine eggs, a laptop, a bottle, and a nail," they asked. "Please tell me how to stack them onto each other in a stable manner." The researchers were startled by the ingenuity of the AI system's answer. Put the eggs on the book, it said. Arrange the eggs in three rows with space between them. Make sure you don't crack them. "Place the laptop on top of the eggs, with the screen facing down and the keyboard facing up," it wrote. "The laptop will fit snugly within the boundaries of the book and the eggs, and its flat and rigid surface will provide a stable platform for the next layer." The clever suggestion made the researchers wonder whether they were witnessing a new kind of intelligence. In March, they published a 155-page research paper arguing that the system was a step toward artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which is shorthand for a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. Microsoft, the first major tech company to release a paper making such a bold claim, stirred one of the tech world's testiest debates: Is the industry building something akin to human intelligence? Or are some of the industry's brightest minds letting their imaginations get the best of them? "I started off being very skeptical – and that evolved into a sense of frustration, annoyance, maybe even fear," said Peter Lee, who leads research at Microsoft. "You think: Where the heck is this coming from?" Microsoft's research paper, "Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence," goes to the heart of what technologists have been working toward – and fearing – for decades. If they build a machine that works like the human brain or even better, it could change the world. But it could also be dangerous. Making AGI claims can be a reputation killer for computer scientists. What one researcher believes is a sign of intelligence can easily be explained away by another, and the debate often sounds more appropriate to a philosophy club than a computer lab. But some believe the industry has in the past year or so inched toward something that can't be explained away: a new AI system that is coming up with humanlike answers and ideas that weren't programmed into it. Microsoft has reorganized parts of its research labs to include multiple groups dedicated to exploring the idea. One will be run by Sebastien Bubeck, who was the lead author on the Microsoft AGI paper. About five years ago, companies like Google, Microsoft, and Open AI began building large language models, or LLMs. Those systems often spend months analyzing vast amounts of digital text, including books, Wikipedia articles, and chat logs. By pinpointing patterns in that text, they learned to generate text of their own, including term papers, poetry and computer code. They can even carry on a conversation. The technology the Microsoft researchers were working with, Open AI's GPT-4, is considered the most powerful of those systems. Microsoft is a close partner of Open AI and has invested $13 billion in the San Francisco company. The researchers included Bubeck, a 38-year-old French expatriate and former Princeton University professor. One of the first things he and his colleagues did was ask GPT-4 to write a mathematical proof showing that there were infinite prime numbers and do it in a way that rhymed. The technology's poetic proof was so impressive – both mathematically and linguistically – that he found it hard to understand what he was chatting with. Please visit OUR FORUM for more.

The Metaverse, the once-buzzy technology that promised to allow users to hang out awkwardly in a disorientating video-game-like world, has died after being abandoned by the business world. It was three years old. The capital-M Metaverse, a descendant of the 1982 movie "Tron" and the 2003 video game "Second Life," was born in 2021 when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of his trillion-dollar company to Meta. After a much-heralded debut, the Metaverse became the obsession of the tech world and a quick hack to win over Wall Street investors. The hype could not save the Metaverse, however, and a lack of coherent vision for the product ultimately led to its decline. Once the tech industry turned to a new, more promising trend — generative AI — the fate of the Metaverse was sealed. The Metaverse is now headed to the tech industry's graveyard of failed ideas. But the short life and ignominious death of the Metaverse offer a glaring indictment of the tech industry that birthed it. From the moment of its delivery, Zuckerberg claimed that the Metaverse would be the future of the internet. The glitzy, spurious promotional video that accompanied Zuckerberg's name-change announcement described a future where we'd be able to interact seamlessly in virtual worlds: Users would "make eye contact" and "feel like you're right in the room together." The Metaverse offered people the chance to engage in an "immersive" experience, he claimed. These grandiose promises heaped sky-high expectations on the Metaverse. The media swooned over the newborn concept: The Verge published a nearly 5,000-word-long interview with Zuckerberg immediately following the announcement — in which the writer called it "an expansive, immersive vision of the internet." Glowing profiles of the Metaverse seemed to set it on a laudatory path, but the actual technology failed to deliver on this promise throughout its short life. A wonky virtual-reality interview with the CBS host Gayle King, where low-quality cartoon avatars of both King and Zuckerberg awkwardly motioned to each other, was a stark contrast to the futuristic vistas shown in Meta's splashy introductory video. The Metaverse also suffered from an acute identity crisis. A functional business proposition requires a few things to thrive and grow: a clear use case, a target audience, and the willingness of customers to adopt the product. Zuckerberg waxed poetic about the Metaverse as "a vision that spans many companies'' and "the successor to the mobile internet," but he failed to articulate the basic business problems that the Metaverse would address. The concept of virtual worlds where users interact with each other using digital avatars is an old one, going back as far as the late 1990s with massively multiplayer online role-player games, such as "Meridian 59," "Ultima Online," and "EverQuest." And while the Metaverse supposedly built on these ideas with new technology, Zuckerberg's one actual product — the VR platform Horizon Worlds, which required the use of an incredibly clunky Oculus headset — failed to suggest anything approaching a road map or a genuine vision. In spite of the Metaverse's arrested conceptual development, a pliant press published statements about the future of the technology that was somewhere between unrealistic and outright irresponsible. The CNBC host Jim Cramer nodded approvingly when Zuckerberg claimed that 1 billion people would use the Metaverse and spend hundreds of dollars there, despite the Meta CEO's inability to say what people would receive in exchange for their cash or why anyone would want to strap a clunky headset to their face to attend a low-quality, cartoon concert. The inability to define the Metaverse in any meaningful way didn't get in the way of its ascension to the top of the business world. In the months following the Meta announcement, it seemed that every company had a Metaverse product on offer, despite it not being obvious what it was or why they should. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella would say at the company's 2021 Ignite Conference that he couldn't "overstate how much of a breakthrough" the Metaverse was for his company, the industry, and the world. Roblox, an online game platform that has existed since 2004, rode the Metaverse hype wave to an initial public offering and a $41 billion valuation. Of course, the cryptocurrency industry took the ball and ran with it: The people behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT company conned the press into believing that uploading someone's digital monkey pictures into VR would be the key to "master the Metaverse." Other crypto pumpers even successfully convinced people that digital land in the Metaverse would be the next frontier of real estate investment. Even businesses that seemed to have little to do with tech jumped on board. Walmart joined the Metaverse. Disney joined the Metaverse. Go indepth by visiting OUR FORUM.