The CEO of OpenAI, the company that unveiled the seemingly ubiquitous ChatGPT in November 2022, says “in a few thousand days” artificial intelligence will give way to an artificial “superintelligence.”
In a blog post titled “The Intelligence Age,” Sam Altman predicts that someday soon — potentially really soon — AI will be smarter than any human who walks, or ever walked, the earth.
“In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents,” he says. “People have become dramatically more capable over time; we can already accomplish things now that our predecessors would have believed to be impossible.”
He adds, “Our grandparents – and the generations that came before them – built and achieved great things. … The story of progress will continue, and our children will be able to do things we can’t.”
Altman says the technology will allow us “to create almost anything we can imagine.”
He forecasts, “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.”
Deep learning — that is feeding knowledge into an artificial intelligence — “worked,” Altman says, bringing about “The Intelligence Age.”
Altman concludes there will be “significant change in labor markets (good and bad),” adding cheekily, “nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter.”
He insists, “If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable.”