Sam Altman predicts that artificial superintelligence (AGI) will happen this year
- Sam Altman looks back on nine years of OpenAI
- He predicts that we will reach AGI by 2025
- AI agents will also enter the job market for the first time
In a long and wistful blog post entitled ‘ReflectionsSam Altman, the erratic CEO of ChatGPT makers OpenAI, has said he believes we will achieve AGI (artificial general intelligence, also known as superintelligence) “as we have traditionally understood it” by 2025 with the release of the first AI agents who join the workforce. He says:
“We are now confident that we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that by 2025 we will see the first AI agents “enter the workforce” and substantially change companies’ output. We continue to believe that putting great tools into hands iteratively leads to great, broadly distributed results.”
While that may sound like bad news for people whose jobs it replaces, it would be a major leap forward for the AGI timeline. I previously interviewed Dr. Ben Goertzel, who predicted that humanity would develop AGI by 2029.
Alan Thompson, an artificial intelligence expert and former chairman of Mensa International, leads the Conservative countdown to AGI web page, and has extended the countdown to achieving AGI to 88% complete in light of Altman’s latest comments, along with the release of Nvidia Cosmos for training humanoid robots.
Fired by surprise
The rest of Altman’s Reflections blog post details the highs and lows of the life of a CEO working in an area of high technology. He particularly remembers being “surprised on a video call” while sitting in a Vegas hotel, and describes the past few years as “the most rewarding, fun, best, interesting, exhausting, stressful and – especially the last few years two – unpleasant years of my life so far.”
However, it is not all doom and gloom. OpenAI has only been around for nine years, and Altman fondly remembers many of the key moments from that time, especially the launch of the ChatGPT chatbot, which kicked off the AI revolution and changed everything virtually overnight .
Altman notes that “the development of AI has taken many twists and turns since then, and we expect even more in the future. Some of the twists were joyful; some have had a hard time. It has been fun to see a steady stream of research miracles happening, and many naysayers have become true believers.”
Speaking specifically about AGI, Altman goes on to say that the entire focus of OpenAI will move beyond ChatGPT and towards AGI:
“We are beginning to aim beyond that, towards superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence we can do something else. Super-intelligent instruments could vastly accelerate scientific discovery and innovation far beyond what we can do on our own, and in turn vastly increase abundance and prosperity.”