OpenAI’s Sam Altman says superintelligent AI could arrive in ‘few thousand days’

OpenAI founder and Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman has said that humanity could have superintelligence soon. "It's possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there," says Altman in a viral private blog post.

Presenting a positive update on the future of humanity and progress towards attaining superintelligence, the founder of the $150 billion AI company says a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be “massive prosperity”.

OpenAI recently launched its GPT 4o version, its most advanced multimodal model that’s faster and cheaper than GPT-4 Turbo.

"Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy, and human will," says the OpenAI CEO.

He predicts that soon AI systems will work as personal assistants to humans, which would help accomplish much more than people ever could without AI.

"Eventually we can each have a personal AI team, full of virtual experts in different areas, working together to create almost anything we can imagine. Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need. We can imagine similar ideas for better healthcare, the ability to create any kind of software someone can imagine, and much more," he says.

'Deep learning worked'

Altman cites cracking the mystry behind "deep learning" as reason for being so positive about GenAI. "How did we get to the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity? In three words: deep learning worked. In 15 words: deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we dedicated increasing resources to it."

He says humanity discovered an algorithm that could learn any distribution of data (or the underlying “rules” that produce it). “To a shocking degree of precision, the more compute and data available, the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems.”

Downsides and Risks

Altman says as seen with other technologies, there will also be downsides, and there is a need to maximise AI’s benefits while minimising harm. "As one example, we expect that this technology can cause a significant change in labour markets (good and bad) in the coming years, but 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). People have an innate desire to create and to be useful to each other, and AI will allow us to amplify our own abilities like never before."

He says if the world wants to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, there is a 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."