OpenAI CEO Sam Altman outlines vision for 'The Intelligence Age'

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman

OpenAI chief executive officer (CEO) Sam Altman in a blog post shared his vision for the future of artificial intelligence (AI), calling it "The Intelligence Age".

Altman said humanity is on the brink of a transformative era, with AI set to revolutionise daily life in ways never seen before. AI will soon evolve into personal assistants, provide customised education and even help with healthcare, he said.

"This phenomenon is not new, but it will be newly accelerated. People have become dramatically more capable over time; we can already accomplish things now that our predecessors would have believed to be impossible," he said in the post.

"We are more capable not because of genetic change, but because we benefit from the infrastructure of society being way smarter and more capable than any one of us; in an important sense, society itself is a form of advanced intelligence."

Altman said “superintelligent AI” could arrive "in a few thousand days", though he admitted it may take longer.

"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 said.

'Deep learning worked'

Altman credited deep learning as the driving force behind AI’s rapid advancement. "Deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we dedicated increasing resources to it," Altman said.

He described how deep-learning algorithms have allowed machines to learn from massive datasets, producing increasingly precise outcomes.

"That’s really it; humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data). To a shocking degree of precision, the more compute and data available, the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems."

The elephant in the room

Despite this optimism, Altman acknowledged one significant challenge: the cost of computing power.

He warned that without substantial expansion in computing infrastructure, AI might become a scarce resource, accessible only to the wealthy.

"If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, 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," he said.

Bright but complex future

Altman admitted that the AI age would not be without its downsides, however, he expressed confidence that the overall benefits would far outweigh the negatives.

"I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now; a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be massive prosperity," he said.

"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. 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."