Superintelligent AI. That’s a phrase that should scare you if you grew up watching sci-fi movies. Whether you like it or not, AI technology is advancing by the day, and the companies working on it are all aiming toward a superintelligent AI. According to Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, superintelligence is only a couple thousand days away.
As powerful as AI technology is today, it’s still not as powerful as AI companies want it to be. That’s because they don’t want AI, they want AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). This is an AI that’s as smart as a human being and smarter. That’s a thought to keep you up at night. We’re not sure that this is even going to happen, but that’s not going to stop AI companies from trying to make it possible.
Sam Altman says that superintelligence is a few thousand days away
Countless professionals in the industry have given their predictions of when AI will finally reach human-level intelligence. The thing is that many of the predictions put this achievement within the next 10 years. Whether that’s true or not remains to be seen. However, if Sam Altman, the man leading OpenAI, says that AGI is near, it won’t hurt to listen.
Altman posted a lengthy post on his own personal blog. Titled “The Intelligence Age”, this is a post talking about the general future of AI and its potential effects on humanity. Sam Altman is one of the voices strongly for the adoption of AI in our daily lives. So, his optimism shines through in this post.
One bit of information he shared was that he feels that superintelligence is only a “few thousand days” away. That’s a pretty odd way to put it. In ..., he said that, “it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there.” … seems to speak mostly about humanity reaching this level of AI and not OpenAI specifically.
What will superintelligent AI mean for humanity?
Well, speaking purely optimistically, this level of intelligence will mean that people will have powerful autonomous personal assistants that they can bring with them, as Altman puts in .... They won’t be restricted by the limitations that plague AI today. These include processing power and hallucinations. It’s this ostensible Utopia where mankind and AI integrate seamlessly.
However, we can’t forget that there’s a bad side to every technology. While people like Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai, and others have high hopes for the technology, we have to acknowledge that there are safety risks associated with AI. Also, we’re already seeing countless people losing their jobs to the technology.
At this point, it’s not a matter of “IF” our AI world will come. It’s a matter of whether or not it’s the one we want or the one we’ve seen in those sci-fi movies (you know, the Schwarzenegger ones).