OpenAI CEO Sam Altman anticipates superintelligence soon

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman penned a rare note on his website today spelling out more of his vision of the AI-powered future, or as he calls it (and his blog post is titled): “The Intelligence Age.“

Specifically, Altman argues that “deep learning works,” and can generalize across a range of domains and difficult problem sets based on its training data, allowing people to “solve hard problems,” including “fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all physics.” As he puts it:

“That’s really it; 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. I find that no matter how much time I spend thinking about this, I can never really internalize how consequential it is.“

In a provocative statement that many AI industry participants and close observers have already seized upon in discussions on X, Altman also said that superintelligence — AI that is “vastly smarter than humans,” according to previous OpenAI statements — may be achieved in “a few thousand days.”

“This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. 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.”

A thousand days is roughly 2.7 years, a time that is much sooner than the five years most experts give out.

Many AI researchers, especially those from OpenAI, have been pursuing superintelligence, and a lower version is normally called artificial general intelligence (AGI). Former OpenAI chief scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever’s new startup even focuses on safe superintelligence.

AI models have begun performing well in “IQ tests,” or knowledge benchmark tests, but they have not yet been better than humans. So far, most use cases of generative AI have not been around a computer program that is vastly smarter than an average human but as assistants to complement human workers as they finish tasks. 

AI experts for everyone

Altman, however, believes that this use case of AI assistants and agents will be widespread in a few years. 

“There are a lot of details we still have to figure out, but it’s a mistake to get distracted by any particular challenge,” Altman said. “Deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems. We can say a lot of things about what may happen next, but the main one is that AI is going to get better with scale, and that will lead to meaningful improvements to the lives of people around the world.”

He added that AI will soon allow everyone to accomplish many things as each person will have a personal AI team with virtual experts in many areas and kids will have personal tutors for any subject. 

It’s not a surprise Altman is an AI maximalist as he runs one of the leading AI companies. OpenAI recently released its most powerful AI model yet, o1, which is capable of reasoning without too much human instruction. 

Altman does point that there are several roadblocks facing this world of widespread AI use, like the need to make compute cheaper and the availability of advanced chips. He even alludes that not building out infrastructure to support AI development, “AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people.” 

Not entirely positive

Altman’s not totally starry eyed about AI’s potential, though. He notes that there will be downsides, stating:

“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.”

Altman makes mention of people losing jobs to AI, something he’s said before, a cursory nod to one of the biggest fears of those outside the tech world bubble.

For Altman, labor under AI will change for both good and bad, but people will never run out of things to do. 

Altman’s manifesto is not surprising to anyone who’s followed the growth of OpenAI and generative AI in the past couple of years. The timing of his musings, however, did cause some to believe this all might be a way to get OpenAI’s next round of funding. The company is reportedly raising $6-$6.5 billion, which will value it at $150 billion.