As 2024 ends, top AI labs, including OpenAI (and by extension, Microsoft), Google, Anthropic, and more, have been on top of their game in the AI arms race. For instance, OpenAI just concluded its "12 days of shipmas," unveiling a plethora of services and products, including OpenAI 01's successor with advanced reasoning capabilities, a new $200 subscription tier for its advanced AI model dubbed ChatGPT Pro, and more.
While the announcements were few, the speculation that AGI (artificial general intelligence) might be here sooner than anticipated stands out the most. Over the past few months, emerging reports indicate that AI could lead to the end of humanity, with a popular AI safety researcher predicting a 99.9% probability that AI will inevitably lead to doom unless progression in the landscape is halted.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently shared some interesting insights on AGI in an interview on The Free Press YouTube Channel (via @tsarnick on X). According to the executive:
"If the rate of scientific progress that's happening in the world as a whole tripled, maybe even like 10x, the discoveries that we used to expect to take 10 years and the technological progress we used to expect to take 10 years. If that happened every year, and then we compounded on that the next one, and the next one and the next one. That to me would feel like superintelligence had arrived."
AGI and superintelligence won't change what we fundamentally care about
Superintelligence and AGI are not the same thing. The former supersedes AGI's capabilities as it constitutes a powerful AI system, outperforming humans with unlimited memory, advanced reasoning capabilities, speed, and more. A technical employee at OpenAI indicated that the AI firm's OpenAI o1 release to general availability constitutes AGI.
Interestingly, Sam Altman had previously indicated that AGI would whoosh by with surprisingly little societal impact. He added that the safety concerns raised about the rapid advancement of AI won't happen during the AGI moment and that it would be a long way from AGI to superintelligence.
Sam Altman admits superintelligence will revolutionize how society and the economy work. However, he claims it won't change the deep fundamental human drives, including what we tend to care about and what drives us, "but the world in which we exist will change a lot."
