Sam Altman has made his boldest prediction yet about when AI will surpass human intelligence.
Altman, always the AI optimist, has previously touted AI’s potential to someday outthink humans, but the technology’s past three years of progress since OpenAI kicked off the AI arms race with ChatGPT’s release have shown him this moment could come sooner rather than later.
The company’s newest AI model is already smarter than he is, Altman added, and the future looks even more optimistic.
While AI may still not be able to do some things humans can do easily, models developed as soon as 2026 could be “quite surprising,” and progress rapidly, Altman said.
“I can easily imagine a world where 30% to 40% of the tasks that happen in the economy today get done by AI in the not very distant future,” he said.
Yet Altman noted that humans, despite the capacity of high-powered technology, will always care about what other humans are doing.
“I think these qualities will be increasingly important in the world of AI,” he said. “We’ll have an incredible tool at our disposal, but we still have to figure out what to do, what other people want, and what other people will find useful.”
“This site is just a small fraction of what we’re building. All of that still won’t be enough to serve even the demand of ChatGPT,” he said during an event at the Texas site this week.
All of this infrastructure will help AI meet the ambitious mission of redefining the world, but Altman thinks the technology is well on its way.
“In another couple of years, it will become very plausible for AI to make, for example, scientific discoveries that humans cannot make on their own,” he told Die Welt. “To me, that’ll start to feel like something we could properly call superintelligence.”
