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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 02 2024, @04:53AM
Isn't it possible, however, a case of the Fish being the last discover water? Magic, and Turing Machines... Turing's initial conceptual idea of what is now called a, 'Turing Machine' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine [wikipedia.org]), is exactly what DNA and a Eukaryotic host is: a Turing Machine.
I think I can grasp the sentiment of your argument: a much more grounded, skeptical, conceptualization of what AGI would be, would require, etc.; and how, we are not there. That the Teddy Bear isn't alive/sentient, it's just that, with enough imagination, or, ignorance, one could believe it to be sentient.
However, forgetting the magic, it seems clear that, a single Eukaryotic Cell, is, in fact, a Turing Machine, by definition: and behaves in ways contrary to that of Billiard Balls. Then there are collective organizations of Eukaryotic Cells, such as plants, animals, fungi. Of these organizations of Cells, some produce humans, which have brains, which, in their own right, seem to not be so much magic, but, quite mystical.
So in the case of the Fish being the last to discover the water, perhaps it's a case of mistaken identity as well: we tend to focus on the chicken, rather than the egg: the DNA/hardware/code, rather then the requisite coupling with that which is to be acted upon, and act upon those instructions.
Yes, it's unlikely a toaster in the year 2042 will be something worth emotional investment/attachment; yet, despite that, there are toasters from the 1950's, adults may still cling to, due to their sentimental value. There are aspects of reality, that, go unexplained, not in some magical sense, due to ignorance, but in a sort of mystical sense.
Magic is clever. Magic can delight, thrill, deceive, etc.. What is mystical, however, is a bit different. For me, I feel as though, what is mystical, is a sort of pointer to something, that says: there is more here than meets the eye, or could meet the eye. What is mystical is profound.
So perhaps we concern ourselves too much with the tape, or the read/write head, and instead remain a bit blind to the negated opposite of that contraption: whether it be situated at a demonstration to be displayed as a parlor trick, or, part of a collective of similar units, to assemble a complex idea.