What you need to know
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently indicated that the company could hit the AGI benchmark within the next 5 years.
- Interestingly, the executive claimed the feat would have "surprisingly little" impact on society.
- This is amid AI's exorbitant computing power and cooling water demands, prompting the AI firm to burn through large sums of money quickly.
OpenAI has been in the spotlight in the past few months, especially after bankruptcy claims, with projections of $5 billion in losses within the next 12 months. However, the ChatGPT maker wiggled its way out of the tight situation through a round of funding, raising $6.6 billion from investors, including Microsoft and NVIDIA which pushed its market cap beyond $157 billion.
Sam Altman has passionately spoken about AGI (artificial general intelligence) and indicated that OpenAI is actively pursuing the audacious feat. In a recent Reddit AMA session conducted by the AI firm, the CEO stated that it's possible to achieve the benchmark with current hardware.
While he didn't categorically state what it'd take to scale the incredible height, the CEO previously claimed it would take $7 trillion and many years to build 36 semiconductor plants and additional data centers to fulfill his AI vision.
As you may know, AI is a resource and power-hungry technology. There are already speculations that there might not be enough electricity to power its sophisticated advances by 2025 despite AI potentially placing the world on the path to the biggest technological breakthrough.
For context, Microsoft and Google's electricity consumption surpasses the power usage of over 100 countries, and it's likely to get higher with more advances. The technology also requires large amounts of cooling water, which has been narrowed down to four times more than previously thought.
AGI could be here sooner than we thought
Sam Altman previously indicated via a blog post that superintelligence is "a few thousand days away." But as it now seems, the executive might have a more defined timestamp for achieving AGI, which he has narrowed down to 5 years (via @tsarnick on X).
In a recent interview on 20VC with Harry Stebbings, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman while making predictions about AI indicated:
"I think in 5 years, it looks like we have an unbelievably rapid rate of improvement in technology itself. People are like, man, the AGI moment came and went. The pace of progress is like totally crazy, and we're discovering all this new stuff, both about AI and research and also about all the rest of science."
Contrary to popular opinion about AI advances, Sam Altman predicts the rapid projection of AI and AGI's impact on society would be "surprisingly little." Altman further indicated "An example of this would be if you asked people 5 years ago if computers were going to pass the Turing test, they'd say no." While computers eventually passed the test, there weren't any significant changes in society, the feat went whooshing by.
In the long term, Sam Altman admits the AI revolution could lead to radical societal changes with rapid scientific progression, outperforming all expectations. Interestingly, a former OpenAI researcher indicated the AI firm was on the verge of achieving AGI but warned the company isn't fully prepared or equipped to handle everything it entailed. This comes after an AI researcher revealed a 99.9% probability AI will end humanity, according to p(doom).
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