- Sam Altman reflects on nine years of OpenAI
- He predicts we will achieve AGI in 2025
- AI Agents will also enter the workforce for the first time
In a long and wistful blog post titled ‘Reflections’ Sam Altman, the mercurial CEO of ChatGPT creators OpenAI, has said that he believes we will achieve AGI (artificial general intelligence, also known as superintelligence) "as we have traditionally understood it" in 2025 with the release of the first AI agents joining the workforce. He says:
“We are now confident 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 output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes."
While that may sound like bad news for people whose jobs it replaces, it would be a big jump forward for the AGI timeline. I previously interviewed Dr Ben Goertzel, who predicted that humanity would develop AGI by 2029.
Alan Thompson, an expert in artificial intelligence and former chairman of Mensa International, runs the Conservative Countdown to AGI web page, and has increased the countdown to achieving AGI as 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 describes the highs and lows of the life of a CEO working in an area of cutting edge technology. In particular he remembers being “fired by surprise on a video call” while sitting in a hotel in Vegas, and describes the last few years as “the most rewarding, fun, best, interesting, exhausting, stressful, and - particularly for the last two - unpleasant years of my life so far.”
It’s not all doom and gloom though. OpenAI is only nine years old, and Altman fondly remembers many of the landmark moments over that time, particularly launching the ChatGPT chatbot, which ignited the AI revolution and changed everything almost overnight.
Altman notes that since then, “AI development has taken many twists and turns and we expect more in the future. Some of the twists have been joyful; some have been hard. It’s been fun watching a steady stream of research miracles occur, and a lot of naysayers have become true believers.”
Talking specifically about AGI, Altman goes on to say that the whole focus of OpenAI will move beyond ChatGPT and towards AGI:
“We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to 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 anything else. 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.”
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