- Sam Altman reflects on nine years of OpenAI
- Predicts that we will reach AGI in 2025
- AI agents will also enter the workforce for the first time
In a long, melancholy blog post titled ‘Reflections’, Sam Altman, the mercurial CEO of OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, said he believes we will achieve AGI (artificial general intelligence, also known as superintelligence) “as we have traditionally understood it” in 2025 with the launch of the first AI agents to 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, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the production of companies. “We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in people’s hands leads to great, widely distributed results.”
While this may seem like bad news for the people whose jobs it replaces, it would be a big step forward for AGI’s timeline. I previously interviewed Dr. Ben Goertzel, who predicted that humanity would develop AGI by 2029.
Alan Thompson, an artificial intelligence expert and former president of Mensa International, runs the Conservative Countdown to AGI website and has increased the countdown to AGI being 88% complete in light of Altman’s latest comments, along with the launch of Nvidia Cosmos. to train humanoid robots.
Fired by surprise
The rest of Altman’s Reflections blog post describes the ups and downs of the life of a CEO working in a cutting-edge technology area. In particular, he recalls being “surprisely fired during a video call” while sitting in a hotel in Las Vegas, and describes the last few years as “the most rewarding, fun, best, interesting, exhausting, stressful and, especially, recent years.” Two unpleasant years in my life so far.”
But it’s not all pessimism. OpenAI is only nine years old, and Altman fondly remembers many of the historic moments from that time, particularly the launch of the chatbot ChatGPT, which ignited the AI revolution and changed everything almost overnight.
Altman notes that since then, “AI development has taken many turns and we expect more in the future. Some of the twists have been light-hearted; some have been difficult. It has been fun to watch a steady stream of research miracles and many naysayers have become true believers.”
Speaking specifically about AGI, Altman goes on to say that OpenAI’s entire focus will go beyond ChatGPT and toward AGI:
“We are starting to orient our goal beyond that, towards superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for a glorious future. With superintelligence we can do anything else. “Super-smart tools could greatly accelerate scientific discovery and innovation far beyond what we are capable of on our own, and in turn vastly increase abundance and prosperity.”
