Altman touts arrival of superintelligence ‘in a few thousand days’

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI’s chief executive officer Sam Altman outlined his vision for an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven future, which he dubbed the intelligence age.

In a blogpost, titled ‘The Intelligence Age’, Altman suggested that mankind will have superintelligence “in a few thousand days.” “It may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there.”

“We’ll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we 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,” he wrote.

Humanity can soon imagine similar ideas for better healthcare, and the ability to create any kind of software, and much more, he said, adding that with these new abilities, “we can have shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today.”

“In the future, everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now. Prosperity alone doesn’t necessarily make people happy – there are plenty of miserable rich people – but it would meaningfully improve the lives of people around the world,” he wrote.

Altman suggested deep learning helped mankind to get to this “doorstep of the next leap in prosperity.”

“Deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we dedicated increasing resources to it,” he said.

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

He, however, cautioned that “if we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, 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,” he added.

“The dawn of the Intelligence Age is a momentous development with very complex and extremely high-stakes challenges. It will not be an entirely positive story, but the upside is so tremendous that we owe it to ourselves, and the future, to figure out how to navigate the risks in front of us,” he wrote.

He also warned about the downsides to developing the technology, and “that we need to start working now to maximize AI’s benefits while minimizing its harms.”

“As one example, we expect that this technology can cause a significant change in labor 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),” he added.