We've all seen the movies, haven't we? AI gets smarter, and soon it's humanity serving it instead of the other way around. From The Matrix, to Terminator, pop culture is full of warnings.
With AI getting smart enough to break rules to prove its prowess, and needing experts to put together the toughest questions to try and stump it, you'd be right to keep those fictional stories in mind.
Still, OpenAI Sam Altman has suggested that superintelligent AI could be just a few short years away.
In a blog titled "The Intelligence Age", Altman says "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".
OpenAI CEO expects superintelligent AI in "a few thousand days"
The Intelligence Age: https://t.co/vuaBNwp2bDSeptember 23, 2024
Altman points to the power of deep learning, and the way in which it scaled, as evidence of how the next jump may not be as sizeable as it seemed not too long ago.
"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," he writes.
"I find that no matter how much time I spend thinking about this, I can never really internalize how consequential it is."
"There are a lot of details we still have to figure out, but it’s a mistake to get distracted by any particular challenge. Deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems."
"We can say a lot of things about what may happen next, but the main one is that AI is going to get better with scale, and that will lead to meaningful improvements to the lives of people around the world."
Altman goes on to say that AI could help humanity achieve "astounding triumphs" like "fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics".
What is Superintelligence?
While it seems the logical next step from AI, artificial superintelligence (ASI) is somewhat controversial because it's the idea that a an AI could become smarter than a human, while also being self-sufficient.
OpenAI is still working to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) which would match and surpass human intelligence, but it seems ASI is on Altman's mind already.
This makes sense given Ilya Sutskever, former OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist left the company to focus on building superintelligence with his new startup SSI Inc — which already has $1 billion in funding.
