Sam Altman Says, ‘The Arrival of Superintelligence Is Just a Few Thousand Days Away’

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, believes that the arrival of superintelligence is just a few thousand days away. In a recent blog post, titled ‘The Intelligence Age’, Altman said that, “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 credited ‘deep learning’ as the driving force behind AI’s rapid progress, saying that humanity has discovered an algorithm capable of learning from massive datasets with increasing precision. He said, “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 quipped. He believes AI can solve complex problems, including climate change, space colonization, and fundamental physics.

Altman imagines a future where AI improves various aspects of life, including personal AI teams that assist with everyday tasks, personalised education through AI tutors for children, and substantial advancements in healthcare and problem-solving abilities.

“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,” he said.

However, Altman said that they need to bring down the cost of compute and make it abundant, which requires a lot 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.”

Moreover, he believes that many jobs currently performed by people will, in the future, seem like a waste of time.

In a recent interview, Altman described the company’s latest AI model, o1, as being at the ‘GPT-2 stage’ of reasoning development. Altman explained, “I think of this as like we’re at the GPT-2 stage of these new kinds of reasoning models.” He emphasised that while the model is still early in its development, significant improvements are expected in the coming months.

Altman said that users will notice o1 rapidly improving as OpenAI moves from the o1-preview model to the full release. “Even in the coming months, you’ll see it get a lot better as we move from o1-preview to o1, which we shared some metrics for in our launch blog post,” he said.

“You will see it reach the GPT-4 equivalent over the coming years.”