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On Monday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman outlined his vision for an AI-driven future of tech progress and global prosperity in a new personal blog post titled "The Intelligence Age." The essay paints a picture of human advancement accelerated by AI, with Altman suggesting that superintelligent AI could emerge within the next decade.
"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," he wrote.
OpenAI's current goal is to create AGI (artificial general intelligence), which is a term for hypothetical technology that could match human intelligence in performing many tasks without the need for specific training. By contrast, superintelligence surpasses AGI, and it could be seen as a hypothetical level of machine intelligence that can dramatically outperform humans at any intellectual task, perhaps even to an unfathomable degree.
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Despite the criticism, it's notable when the CEO of what is probably the defining AI company of the moment makes a broad prediction about future capabilities—even if that means he's perpetually trying to raise money. Building infrastructure to power AI services is foremost on many tech CEOs' minds these days."If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible," Altman writes in his essay, "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."
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While enthusiastic about AI's potential, Altman urges caution, too, but vaguely. He writes, "We need to act wisely but with conviction. 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."
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"Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter," he wrote. "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."
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Sunday September 29 2024, @10:50PM (4 children)
And if we do build enough, we'll have the option of fighting with [youtu.be]. Both good choices.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Unixnut on Sunday September 29 2024, @11:27PM (2 children)
I do suspect that if AGI reaches the point where it can be made into an automated killing machine (*), I think it more likely that rather a single AGI "going rogue" and deciding to wipe out humanity, each major rich nation in the world will have its own AI, configured to destroy the others in a conflict.
It would be ironic if after years of science fiction narcissistically telling us that AI would want to kill or enslave us all, what would actually happen is that our extinction event ends up being just collateral damage when large robotic armies work to destroy each other.
Beyond that there is no real way to outcomplete those with money and power from having the best AI. As a technology it is very capital intensive and very centralised by design. You have to build huge GPU clusters with fast interconnects, feed those power hungry GPUs and have entire teams tasked with sanitising and structuring the input data in such a way as the model can be correctly trained to your needs. So those with the most money/power will naturally end up with the best models and most powerful AI systems.
(*) If I am honest warfare is not only the most realistic future direction it also likely to be the first major application for AGI. You don't need a superintelligent AGI for robot soldiers. In fact you don't want it too smart. Smart enough to obey orders and understand instructions, but not smart enough to understand the implications of those orders, a guess an approximate intelligence level of an 8-10 year old would suffice.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday September 29 2024, @11:35PM
I can't help but feel that AI destroying humanity will be less a matter of kill all humans [youtu.be] and more "Wait, I think I stepped on something."
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday September 30 2024, @01:03AM
If you put it that way, an AGI that can graduate from boot camp would be an unambiguous milestone.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 30 2024, @12:38AM
The infrastructure is beach sand cheap, there's nothing inherently rare in the process, the main limiter is power (thus the reactivation of Three Mile Island...)
Meanwhile: https://futurism.com/the-byte/google-paid-billion-single-ai-researcher-back [futurism.com]
It would seem that figuring certain aspects out (or finding them like a blind squirrel does an acorn), is still quite valuable in the race to some arbitrary milestone that the business users are treating like the Holy Grail.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]