Francois Chollet

The point is that existing technology has reached a plateau.

And if you want to go beyond that, if you want to start being able to tackle problems that you haven't memorized, that you haven't seen before, you need to try new ideas.

And Arc is not just meant to be this sort of like measure of how close we are to AGI.

It's also meant to be a source of inspiration.

Like I want researchers to look at these puzzles and be like, hey, it's really strange that these puzzles are so simple and most humans can just do them very quickly.

Why is it so hard for existing AI systems?

Why is it so hard for LLMs and so on?

And this is true for LLMs, but Arc was actually released before LLMs were really a thing.

And the only thing that made it special at the time was that it was designed to be a resistance to memorization.

And the fact that it has survived LLMs in general so well kind of shows that, yes, it is actually resistant to memorization.

I think that's actually really sad that Frontier research is no longer being published.

If you look back, you know, four years ago,

Well, everything was just openly shared, like all the state-of-the-art results were published.

And this is no longer the case.

And it's very much, you know, OpenAI single-handedly changed the game.

And I think OpenAI basically set back progress towards AGI by quite a few years, probably like five to ten years, for two reasons.

And one is that, well, they caused this complete closing down of research, frontier research publishing.

but also they triggered this initial burst of hype around LLMs.

And now LLMs have sucked the oxygen out of the room.

Like everything, everyone is just doing LLMs.