And the cutthroat competition doesn’t look like it will ease anytime soon.
Exactly how small is that group of people, and what do they know that others don’t, CNBC’s Andrew Sorkin asked.
“The bet, the hope is they know how to discover the remaining ideas to get to superintelligence—that there are going to be a handful of algorithmic ideas and, you know, medium-sized handful of people who can figure them out,” Altman replied.
While immense fortunes are being thrown at a handful of top engineers, Altman estimated the number of people smart enough to make superintelligence breakthroughs is actually much, much larger.
“I bet it’s much bigger than people think, but you know some companies in the space have decided that they’re going to go after a few shiny names,” he told CNBC. “I think there’s probably many thousands of people that we could find and probably tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people in the world that are capable of doing this kind of work.”
