By now, I’m sure you’ve seen dozens of headlines like, “OpenAI may have discovered AI so powerful it could end humanity.”

Calm yourself. Humanity is safe.

If you are interested in understanding what all the noise is about, do a little research about “q*” (pronounced Q-star). This is the algorithmic methodology that OpenAI is rumored to have developed that will bring it (and, by proxy, us) closer to AGI (artificial general intelligence): a form of AI that can understand, learn, and apply its intelligence broadly and flexibly across a wide range of tasks, similar to (or better than) humans.

After you learn what q* is supposed to be able to accomplish, you’ll need to explore Q-learning, a subset of reinforcement learning pivotal in teaching AI to make decisions. From there, learn about the A* search algorithm, widely used in pathfinding and graph traversal, which finds the shortest path between two points. I’m pretty sure that q* is a combination of these two techniques.

I’ll write next Sunday’s essay about q* and AGI. Until then, stay calm. AI does not pose an existential threat to humanity… at least not yet.

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