- Sam Altman looks back on nine years of OpenAI
- He predicts we will reach AGI in 2025
- AI agents will also enter the job market for the first time
In a long, melancholy blog post titled “Thoughts,” Sam Altman, the mercurial CEO of ChatGPT creators OpenAI, said he believes we will achieve AGI (artificial general intelligence, also known as superintelligence). “as we have traditionally understood it” in 2025 with the release of the first AI agents entering the job market. He says:
“We are now confident that we know how to create AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that in 2025 we could see the first AI agents “joining the workforce” and significantly changing business output. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in people’s hands leads to great, widely distributed results. »
While this may seem like bad news to people whose jobs are being replaced, it would be a big step forward for the AGI timeline. I previously interviewed Dr. Ben Goertzel, who predicted that humanity would develop AGI by 2029.
Alan Thompson, artificial intelligence expert and former president of Mensa International, runs the Conservative Countdown to AGI webpage and has increased the countdown to AGI at 88% in light of the latest comments from Altman, as well as the release of Nvidia Cosmos. to train humanoid robots.
Taken by surprise
The rest of Altman’s Reflections blog post describes the ups and downs of life as a CEO working in a cutting-edge technology field. He notably remembers being “surprised fired on a video call” while sitting in a hotel in Vegas, and describes the last few years as “the most rewarding, the most fun, the best, the most interesting , the most exhausting, the most stressful and, in particular, the last”. two unpleasant years of my life so far.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. OpenAI is only nine years old, and Altman fondly remembers many notable moments from that time, especially the launch of the ChatGPT chatbot, which sparked the AI revolution and changed everything almost overnight.
Altman notes that since then, “AI development has taken many twists and turns and we expect more in the future. Some twists and turns were joyful; some have been difficult. It’s been fun to watch a steady stream of research miracles happen, and many naysayers become true believers.
Speaking specifically about AGI, Altman goes on to say that the whole of OpenAI will move beyond ChatGPT and towards AGI:
“We are starting to shift our focus beyond that, towards superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for a glorious future. With superintelligence we can do other things. Superintelligent tools could dramatically accelerate scientific discovery and innovation, far beyond what we are capable of doing ourselves, and thereby dramatically increase abundance and prosperity.
