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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: 1) by pTamok on Monday September 30 2024, @09:52AM
I was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
'Few' is a comparator as well as an absolute. I'd agree that 'few' in absolute terms means more than 'a couple' but less than 'some', but there is overlap, depending on context. But, when used as a comparator, it means that one number is considerably less than another - so the 'few' at Thermopylae [wikipedia.org] were between 1,000 and 2,000 men compared to the Persian army of over 100,000, and 'the Few [wikipedia.org]' in the context of the RAF pilots of the Second World War and the ariel defence of the UK in summer/autumn 1940 [wikipedia.org] compared to the whole UK military. Similarly, if you say 'few people have only one leg', it's a comparator with the number of people with other numbers of legs - the absolute number of one-legged people is quite large, and not just a bit more than 'a couple'. The number of people who have had a lower limb amputated in the UK population is somewhere between 5 and 25 per 100,000 [bmj.com], so for the current UK population of about 67 million, that gives a lower bound of about 335 people (that number can be criticised in many ways, not least because some amputations could be part of double amputations). 335 is not 'a few', but is 'few' compared to the UK population.