OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Anticipates Superintelligence In 'a Few Thousand Days'

In a rare blog post today, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman laid out his vision of the AI-powered future, which he refers to as 'The Intelligence Age.' Among the most notable claims, Altman said superintelligence might be achieved in 'a few thousand days.' VentureBeat reports: Specifically, Altman argues that 'deep learning works,' and can generalize across a range of domains and difficult problem sets based on its training data, allowing people to 'solve hard problems,' including 'fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all physics.' As he puts it: 'That's really it; humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying 'rules' that produce any distribution of data). To a shocking degree of precision, the more compute and data available, the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems. I find that no matter how much time I spend thinking about this, I can never really internalize how consequential it is.'

In a provocative statement that many AI industry participants and close observers have already seized upon in discussions on X, Altman also said that superintelligence -- AI that is 'vastly smarter than humans,' according to previous OpenAI statements -- may be achieved in 'a few thousand days.' 'This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I'm confident we'll get there.' A thousand days is roughly 2.7 years, a time that is much sooner than the five years most experts give out.

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