Sam Altman on artificial superintelligence: ‘There is a lot of compounding left to do’

Talking about superintelligent AI systems, Altman said that he sees a clear path to it. “I can see a path where the work we are doing just keeps compounding and the rate of progress we’ve made over the last three years continues for the next three or six or nine or whatever,” he said. 

Altman also acknowledged the possibility of unexpected obstacles. However, he maintained an optimistic outlook about AI’s potential to transform humanity’s capabilities. For the uninitiated, AGI is when a machine gets human-like intelligence and ASI is a machine that surpasses human intelligence and potentially solves previously unknown problems. 

In the hour-long interview, Altman also discussed the journey from OpenAI’s inception to the ongoing AI revolution. He said that when OpenAI was launched in 2015, his team made a ‘radical declaration’ that they were pursuing AGI.  “We said from the very beginning we were going to go after AGI at a time when in the field you weren’t allowed to say that because that just seemed impossibly crazy,” Altman told the host. 

According to him, this bold revelation led to criticism from established leaders. He recalled that the early days were marked by determination with fewer resources and stiff competition from the likes of DeepMind. He said that the company had to be strategic back then. 

“We were far less resourced than DeepMind and others and so we said okay, they’re going to try a lot of things and we’ve just got to pick one and really concentrate and that’s how we can win here,” Altman explains. According to the CEO, this strategy of focusing in a single direction rather than many turned out to define OpenAI’s approach.