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On Monday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman outlined his vision for an AI-driven future of tech progress and global prosperity in a new personal blog post titled “The Intelligence Age.” The essay paints a picture of human advancement accelerated by AI, with Altman suggesting that superintelligent AI could emerge within the next decade.
“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,” he wrote.
OpenAI’s current goal is to create AGI (artificial general intelligence), which is a term for hypothetical technology that could match human intelligence in performing many tasks without the need for specific training. By contrast, superintelligence surpasses AGI, and it could be seen as a hypothetical level of machine intelligence that can dramatically outperform humans at any intellectual task, perhaps even to an unfathomable degree.
Superintelligence (sometimes called “ASI” for “artificial superintelligence”) is a popular but sometimes fringe topic among the machine-learning community, and it has been for years—especially since controversial philosopher Nick Bostrom authored a book titled Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies in 2014. Former OpenAI co-founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI in June to found a company with the term in its name: Safe Superintelligence. Meanwhile, Altman himself has been talking about developing superintelligence since at least last year.
So, just how long is “a few thousand days”? There’s no telling exactly. The likely reason Altman picked a vague number is because he doesn’t exactly know when ASI will arrive, but it sounds like he thinks it could happen within a decade. For comparison, 2,000 days is about 5.5 years, 3,000 days is around 8.2 years, and 4,000 days is almost 11 years.
It’s easy to criticize Altman’s vagueness here; no one can truly predict the future, but Altman, as CEO of OpenAI, is likely privy to AI research techniques coming down the pipeline that aren’t broadly known to the public. So even when couched with a broad time frame, the claim comes from a noteworthy source in the AI field—albeit one who is heavily invested in making sure that AI progress does not stall.
