In a post on his personal blog, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that he believes OpenAI “know[s] how to build [artificial general intelligence]” as it has traditionally understood it — and is beginning to turn its aim to “superintelligence.”
“We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future,” Altman wrote in the post, which was published late Sunday evening. “Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.”
AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a nebulous term. But OpenAI has its own definition: “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” OpenAI and Microsoft, the startup’s close collaborator and investor, also have a definition of AGI: AI systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profits. (When OpenAI achieves this, Microsoft will lose access to its technology, per an agreement between the two companies.)
So which definition might Altman be referring to? He doesn’t say explicitly. But the former seems likeliest. In the post, Altman wrote that he thinks that AI agents — AI systems that can perform certain tasks autonomously — may “join the workforce,” in a manner of speaking, and “materially change the output of companies” this year.
“We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes,” Altman wrote.
That’s possible. But it’s also true that today’s AI technology has significant technical limitations. It hallucinates. It makes mistakes obvious to any human. And it can be very expensive.
Altman seems confident all this can be overcome — and quickly. But if there’s anything we’ve learned about AI from the past few years, it’s that timelines can shift.
“We’re pretty confident that in the next few years, everyone will see what we see, and that the need to act with great care, while still maximizing broad benefit and empowerment, is so important,” Altman wrote. “Given the possibilities of our work, OpenAI cannot be a normal company. How lucky and humbling it is to be able to play a role in this work.”