SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said OpenAI's newest model is showing signs of "super intelligence."
Speaking to CNBC, Son, whose company is among the largest OpenAI shareholders, said the company's AI is designing its next model.
"So that's going to happen to all the other major models," Son added, noting that human engineers will soon be unable to contribute to future designs.
"It's going to be exponentially smarter than all of us. That's a super intelligence," he added.
The remarks are similar to ones made by Anthropic in a blog post on Thursday. The company, the other AI giant, said that "recursive self-improvement" could happen sooner than expected.
The company noted that new data shows its frontier models have increased their speed of coding, debugging and research. That situation, it added, could form a feedback loop in which the tools create better models on their own.
"The big story here is what we see are indications that, contrary to some popular opinion, AI progress is going to speed up in coming years rather than stay the same, or diminish," Anthropic's Jack Clark told Axios.
"As organizations, and eventually probably as societies, we need to figure out the tools to validate and verify that the stuff being done by these AI systems is correct and is aligned with human intentions aligned with a thriving society," he added.
The company noted that recursive self-improvement has not been achieved yet and it is not "inevitable," but could come soon. That scenario could come with benefits and risks. The former could impact fields like science and healthcare, while the latter could also "increase the risks of humans losing control over AI systems."
"If systems are capable of fully building their own successors, the ways we secure them, monitor them, and shape their behavior all grow much more important," the post noted.
At the moment, humans are better at "research taste and judgment, including choosing which problems matter, which results to trust, and when an approach is a dead end," Anthropic said.
However, should that change, one of the future scenarios could be recursive self-improvement. "In this world, the pace of progress in AI development becomes determined entirely by the availability of compute (or the speed of discovering various efficiencies in algorithmic training or inference) for AI systems," Anthropic said.
In this scenario, humans would play a "substantially diminished role in their development, likely moving most of our effort towards oversight, validation, and verification of an expanding 'virtual lab' run by AI systems.
The company noted that it cannot predict what the world would look like in that case. "It is difficult to predict what the economy looks like if human labor stops being competitive."
As a result, Anthropic said that if it "were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think that would likely be a good thing."
However, it said it is not possible because "if a slowdown simply lets the least cautious actors catch up technologically, it could leave everyone less safe."
