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Sam Altman, the CEO and co-founder of OpenAI, believes that artificial superintelligence is going to be here in roughly 10 years’ time – even if we don’t really know what exactly it is.
“It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there,” Altman writes in a blog post published on Monday, September 23.
Sharing his thoughts on the future of AI, Altman further anticipates the dawn of a new ‘Intelligence Age’ that will result in “massive prosperity”. “I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now,” he says.
As the head of one of the biggest AI startups in the world, Altman undoubtedly wields significant influence in the AI community which could give his futuristic claims some weight. However, he is also heavily invested in ensuring that AI progress does not lose its momentum.
Currently, OpenAI is locked in a race to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), which is an umbrella term used to refer to technology that outperforms humans in several tasks without specifically being trained to do so.
The term ‘artificial superintelligence‘ has its roots in a 2014 book titled Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies written by controversial philosopher Nick Bostrom, according to a report by ArsTechnica.
In June this year, OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever exited the company and started a new venture called Safe Superintelligence, which recently raised over $1billion in capital from investors. Though, it is still unclear what research will be carried out by the startup.
As for Altman, developing artificial superintelligence has been on his mind since last year. At a recent talk, he spoke about AI having its own shared intelligence in a joined infrastructure.
“AGI is not about what exists in any one data center […] but it’s this vast production – of intelligence and a technology tree that lets us – accomplish things well (beyond) the information and processing power of some (individual) neural network,” he was quoted as saying by Forbes.
“I am so freaking tired of all the AI hype: it has no basis in reality and serves only to inflate valuations, inflame the public, garnet [sic] headlines, and distract from the real work going on in computing,” computer scientist and AI critic Grady Booch posted on X in response to Altman’s “few thousand days” prediction.
In his blog post, Sam Altman stated that AI could help in extraordinary feats such as fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics.
On the need for more AI infrastructure, the OpenAI CEO said, “We need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people.”
In line with the industry shift towards AI models as ‘co-pilots’ or ‘agents’, Altman said, “AI models will soon serve as autonomous personal assistants who carry out specific tasks on our behalf like coordinating medical care on your behalf. At some point further down the road, AI systems are going to get so good that they help us make better next-generation systems and make scientific progress across the board.”
Talking about the impact of AI on jobs, Altman said that he expects the technology to result in good and bad changes in labour markets in the coming years. “Most jobs will change more slowly than most people think, and I have no fear that we’ll run out of things to do (even if they don’t look like “real jobs” to us today),” he added.
