Altman says AGI is closer than we think: but it’s no big deal

Humanity-saving OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is stepping back from his previous claims that artificial general intelligence (AGI) will basically save planet Earth.

OpenAI said nearly two years ago that AGI could “elevate humanity” and “give everyone incredible new capabilities.”

Altman also suggested numerous times that superintelligence will produce “prosperity for all.” In September, he enthused that AGI could fix the climate, help humans to establish a space colony and to discover “all of physics.”

Now, it looks like he’s attempting to lower expectations. During The New York Times DeaBook Summit, Altman said: “My guess is we will hit AGI sooner than most people in the world think and it will matter much less.”

“A lot of the safety concerns that we and others expressed actually don’t come at the AGI moment. AGI can get built, the world mostly goes on in mostly the same way, things grow faster, but then there is a long continuation from what we call AGI to what we call superintelligence,” Altman added.

What’s going on? Well, OpenAI likes to be the first at everything so maybe a little marketing trick is on the cards.

The Verge says that the AI company intends to glue together its family of large language models and then declare that to be AGI – even though the creation might actually be far from what could be imagined as superintelligence.

“I expect the economic disruption to take a little longer than people think because there’s a lot of inertia in society. So, in the first couple of years, maybe not that much changes. And then maybe a lot changes,” said Altman, choosing less grandiose words than in the past.

Altman – who also recently said that superintelligence will arrive “in a few thousand days” – mused that the firm will release increasingly powerful tech over the next year.

In the field of generative AI, OpenAI was the company that started the boom in late 2022 when it released its chatbot ChatGPT. The firm, supported financially by Microsoft, is now valued at $157 billion.

However, competition is now fierce, and Elon Musk, behind his own startup xAI, has sued OpenAI for putting commercial interests ahead of the public good. Musk co-founded OpenAI as a non-profit entity but left the company after falling out with Altman.

During the event, Altman said he was “tremendously sad” about his sour relationship with Musk. But he stressed he rejects the idea that Musk – now very close to the President-elect Donald Trump – could hurt OpenAI through political power.