OpenAI CEO heralds approach of achieving singularity

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes developers and engineers are nearing the arrival of the singularity, which is the point when artificial intelligence models surpass human intelligence and develop into self-perpetuating systems.

“We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started,” Altman opined in a blog post. “Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be.”

The post provides some insight into the possible, ultimate end game of AI. The CEO of the Microsoft-backed (NASDAQ:MSFT) OpenAI, the creator of the popular ChatGPT, envisions a world, as near as the 2030s, where work, society and culture will be dramatically different.

“2025 has seen the arrival of agents that can do real cognitive work; writing computer code will never be the same,” Altman said. “2026 will likely see the arrival of systems that can figure out novel insights. 2027 may see the arrival of robots that can do tasks in the real world … the 2030s are likely going to be wildly different from any time that has come before. We do not know how far beyond human-level intelligence we can go, but we are about to find out.”

Altman foresees a time in the ever-approaching, not too distant future when AI systems operate with little to no intervention to build better, more powerful versions of themselves.

“The economic value creation has started a flywheel of compounding infrastructure buildout to run these increasingly-powerful AI systems,” he said. “And robots that can build other robots (and in some sense, datacenters that can build other datacenters) aren’t that far off … As datacenter production gets automated, the cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity.”

He admits this will quell, or even eliminate, the need for workers across various fields and industries, but the human spirit, and its adaptability, will persevere.

“There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before,” Altman added.