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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: 5, Insightful) by corey on Sunday September 29 2024, @11:22PM (12 children)
Ah forgot to say, I love it (not) when these guys gaslight people’s jobs of the past. Maybe the lamplighters were happy? Maybe they loved their jobs and gave them pride. Maybe more than the probably disconnected, isolated jobs of today he’s referring to. And why is it worse anyway? What are humans here to actually do? Why do we need to “progress” with AI?
We’re not here to do anything or achieve anything. Existence is just that. We’re just ants walking around, doing stuff. All there really is, is for people to be happy. I’m not sure people around the world collectively are more happy now than they were when they were lamplighters. And that brings me to my other point. Sam and his “visionary” AI knuckleheads in Silicon Valley endlessly want more compute. That means energy and rare earths. And that means more pollution, more waste and suffering for those mining it. Progress. Super intelligent AI, whoopee, but the biosphere is dying from greenhouse gases as a result. Well, i bet if we asked the magic super AI how to fix global warming, it would say get rid of the humans.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Unixnut on Sunday September 29 2024, @11:38PM (4 children)
It is funny to think how much they were screeching about the resources used in mining Bitcoin. I remember all the graphs showing how many countries worth of energy the grid consumed in order to keep the blockchain secure, so much whining about the destruction of the environment, etc...
Yes here we have a technology that will be just as power hungry, if not more. Yet we hear barely a peep about its carbon footprint, all the natural space ruined to fit massive concrete datacentres to house all this, nor to mention all the electricity required to run it 24/7 while it develops ML models. It could well eclipse the crypto mining costs, yet you barely hear anything about it.
I guess the powers that be think AI will be useful to them, probably as a tool of mass surveillance and control, so suddenly the environment no longer matters. Proof that they trot out the environment card when they don't like something (usually because it reduces their power) in order to discredit it.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Monday September 30 2024, @04:13AM (3 children)
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 30 2024, @12:29PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 01 2024, @03:46AM (1 child)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 01 2024, @08:32AM
It's not my optimism. My point here is that even such relatively high energy consumption can be rather easily justified by what you do with it. Here, it doesn't make sense to complain merely because it's more energy consumption than the country of New Zealand.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 30 2024, @01:27AM
>What are humans here to actually do?
I'll go with "Buddhism sees this desire to see others become happy as the highest, most noble aspect of the human heart." https://buddhability.org/purpose/caring-for-others-is-caring-for-ourselves/ [buddhability.org]
Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, often extended this sentiment pragmatically: "at least try not to hurt others too much along your path."
Inasmuch as AI can relieve cube farm dwellers of their Kafkaesque servitude, that is a good thing, as long as they aren't being significantly hurt in the transition to post AI society.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Monday September 30 2024, @02:33AM (2 children)
Made me think of something I heard on the news tonight: the looming dockworkers' strike in the US- one of their demands is "a ban on automated cranes, gates and trucks." Not sure what really defines "AI" but the automation they're fighting isn't far off, and maybe would use some "AI" in controls.
I see the actual problem in a different light. More automation / AI means less human work hours for the same product / service output. But in my ideal world, maybe we could all work fewer hours and everything would even out.
A couple of years ago I was doing some gig work (electrical contracting) and another guy on the jobsite was from Germany. Rightly so he was extolling the wonders and virtues of Germany. So I asked him, if Germany is so great, why are you in the US? He said: "they won't let me work as many hours as I want to".
I haven't done any more research, but maybe they understand economics better, and understand that if someone wants to work 100 hours a week, 2 or 3 other people might have no work. Yes, aforementioned guy was a bit crazy and didn't seem to need sleep. He would work well over 100 hours a week, in addition to owning several rental properties he cared for, and was renovating another.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 30 2024, @12:53PM
Human work is not a conserved quantity. It's very easy for that 100 hour per week guy to generate jobs for several other people. The economically ignorant call them "bullshit jobs" [soylentnews.org], but it's paying work just the same.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday October 02 2024, @07:06AM
I guess we've seen it coming for a couple decades [youtu.be] at this point.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 30 2024, @03:24AM
Keep in mind that reality "gaslit" those jobs too. That's in large part why those jobs don't exist any more.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 30 2024, @03:25AM
Keep in mind that reality "gaslit" those jobs too. That's in large part why those jobs don't exist any more.
Indeed. Maybe the greater suffering of the past made us happier? Sounds like a good experimental project for a sadistic AI to try.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Monday September 30 2024, @10:00AM
In the absence of any other constraints, it seems like an efficient solution*.
*If you mean 'fix' as in 'repair'. On the other hand, if you mean 'fix' as in 'fix in place'/'make permanent' (e.g. a 'fixed grin', or 'fixing a photographic negative') then getting rid of humans would not make global warming permanent. I'm not sure which meaning an LLM would use.