OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Anticipates Superintelligence In 'a Few Thousand Days'
- Reference: 0175117459
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/24/09/23/2321221/openai-ceo-sam-altman-anticipates-superintelligence-in-a-few-thousand-days
- Source link:
> 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.
[1] https://ia.samaltman.com/
[2] https://venturebeat.com/ai/openai-ceo-sam-altman-anticipates-superintelligence-soon-defends-ai-in-rare-personal-blog-post/
what do you expect? (Score:3)
Sam Altman saying that his company can do everything is the same as Jensen Huang saying GPUs will replace CPUs.
Re: (Score:1)
As far as total computations done in the world, they could indeed become the vast majority of chips and/or computations. But that doesn't mean traditional computing is going way, only that it may grow computationally relatively trivial.
Tech bros be bro'ing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Funny he says this now, right when venture capital investments in AI are being questioned and decelerating.
One Thing We Know for Sure (Score:1)
If a movie about this could have been made in the mid 1950s, Edward G. Robinson would have played Altman.
What we know (Score:2)
Meat isn't magically imbued with intelligence. We know there's no reason to believe that our minds emerge from the patterns of chemical reactions in our brains. From that it should be obvious that the substrate doesn't matter, it's the pattern.
What we absolutely don't know the first thing about just yet is how to make a pattern from which intelligence will emerge.
So tomorrow, next year, or a thousand years from now... nobody knows if or when we will create a genuine artificial intelligence, only that it is
Re: (Score:2)
I don't believe there is a real definition of what 'genuine artificial intelligence' even is.
Once we can't tell the difference between an 'artificial intelligence' and our own, is that then 'genuine'?
Re: What we know (Score:2)
Even if you can distinguish, it might still be intelligent. I can distinguish the writing style of Dickens from the writing style of Grisham, but both are intelligent.
Re: (Score:2)
"We know there's no reason to believe that our minds emerge from the patterns of chemical reactions in our brains"
But we have every reason to believe our "minds emerge", whatever that means, from chemical reactions in our brains. Patterns of chemical reactions, though, not sure what the point of that is.
"Meat isn't magically imbued with intelligence."
It appears, considering your vaguely religious claim, that you believe if does.
There is no magic to intelligence, despite you not believing that it can arise
Re: (Score:2)
Oh FFS.
"We know there's no reason to believe that our minds emerge from ANYTHING OTHER THAN the patterns of chemical reactions in our brains."
Preview, then post. Preview, then post.
Maybe next time...
It's his job to promote his company. (Score:3)
This is just promotion. It does not make what he says true or false. It's always going to always be getting better, greater and more useful. To be credible you need someone that is involved and studies the subject but does not benefit from saying his opinion one way or another.
Re: (Score:2)
If he truly believed such a breakthrough were right around the corner, he wouldn't be posting it and begging money off of other people. I agree it's just promotion, I don't agree that it doesn't indicate whether it's true of false. It's a grift.
I can't wait till the intelligence age (Score:4, Insightful)
because we sure are in the dumb age right now.
Just what I needed to start the day (Score:3)
The musings and vision of a tech bro billionnaire working his ass off to take my job away and destroy everything that hold society together.
Bro? (Score:2)
> Business bro says thing to make his business' line go up.
Please tell me no one is entertaining this spambot?
Aim lower (Score:2)
> allowing people to "solve hard problems," including "fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all physics."
How about Supercharger cables that can actually reach the charging port on my Chevy? Oops, wrong tech company.
So Superintelligence is 10 years away. (Score:2)
Sounds like nuclear fusion. Always just around the corner, just hand over a few more billions.
Re: (Score:2)
The difference being we have a far better idea whether fusion is possible with our current understanding of technology. It's developed in the open, and a ton is understood - most of what isn't understood is then published openly as we learn more.
Much of the AI... pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Or the curtain. Or the man shoveling cash into the boiler to keep the thing powered.
By the way, we need more cash.
The first conandrum super-AI will have to solve (Score:2)
when it comes to life is how to keep powering itself. Nevermind climate change or space colonies.
cocaine supply (Score:2)
Mr. Altman, how much longer do you anticipate your mountain of cocaine will last?
'a Few Thousand Days'
What then?
'another funding round and we talk about the chemistry skills of gpt666'
bubbles and fairy-lands. (Score:2)
Some CEOs and heads of state exist in a make-believe fairy land that they order their underlings to create for them so that they can live inside it.
And the answer is... (Score:2)
42. And then we will need to spend a thousand years building an even bigger computer...
Just Ask It (real output) (Score:2)
count how many days are in the phrase 'a few thousand days'
ChatGPT said:
The phrase "a few thousand days" contains four days when you count the individual words. If you meant something different, just let me know!
PR (Score:2)
Is there a reason the utterances of scammers like Sam Altman deserve all this attention? The cycle is well established; OpenAI is bleeding money, their products are unprofitable and not meeting expectations, roll Sam out to make more bizarre, unfounded claims, media reports on it, rinse, repeat.
Very optimistic (Score:2)
General AI has been about 20 years away for decades already.
Yeah, I'd say that 20 years is "a few thousand days," so it fits.
Re: (Score:2)
> General AI has been about 20 years away for decades already.
> Yeah, I'd say that 20 years is "a few thousand days," so it fits.
Up until a couple years ago I would have said a lot longer than 20 years.
Now? I think it's still quite a ways off, but I wouldn't have predicted ChatGPT, so I'm not going to be feel confident that AGI isn't around the corner until these LLMs plateau.
Great (Score:2)
Sam Altman has started sermon snake oil
vc is getting impatient (Score:4, Funny)
no no no, it isn't going to be several years, just a few thousand days!
Re: (Score:1)
1095 days = 3 years
A few thousand days = 3000+ days = 8+ years
That's long enough for him to get fired again and still have time to find some other excuse for missing his prediction, assuming that WW3 leaves anyone alive to remember his crazy prediction.
Re: vc is getting impatient (Score:2)
Translation: we realize investor expectations for superintelligence in 5 years are utterly bonkers, so this is our way to temper expectations by hyping superintelligence in "a few" (>2) "thousands of days" (3.3.years)... so we can use the same statement to justify our valuation for a few more years before people who cannot do math catch on.
Re: (Score:2)
The title is wrong, it should have read "Sam Altman's Latest Brain Fart makes Slashdot".
Gigaseconds (Score:2)
You mean it could happen any gigasecond now!
Re: vc is getting impatient (Score:2)
Sam Altman is a marketer. He got a couple years CS education at Stanford, which is good but it doesn't prepare you to answer the deep questions about AI. His idea here is that all we have to do is scale up the AI models and we'll have super intelligence. That seems unlikely, it seems like we will need new algorithms to have super intelligence. However, there is some room for growth still (increasing the number of parameters so AI doesn't forget context do easily). But no one knows for sure what difference t
Re: (Score:2)
For any meaningful improvement though you need exponential increases. Considering that OpenAI is already demanding the highest end GPUs and scraping everything they can find, I personally doubt that the resources to continue improving GPT at this scale exist.
Re: vc is getting impatient (Score:3)
Worth mentioning that at the scale of compute they have been, they could probably crack the encryption on a lot of the Bitcoin wallets with weaker passwords.
Re: (Score:2)
> OpenAI is already demanding the highest end GPUs
The next step is custom silicon.
OpenAI is aggressively recruiting chip designers and has hired some engineers who worked on Google's TPU.
Re: (Score:2)
That is one piece of the puzzle, but there are still limitations to the amount of training data they can scrape (especially when so much new stuff on the internet is AI generated as well), massive power consumption of data centres, local utilities struggling to supply those energy requirements, and shortages of water causing problems with keeping equipment cool. I think the writing is on the wall. These tech bros and VCs are relying on some kind of breakthrough by throwing money at the problem, but I don't
Re: (Score:2)
> there are still limitations to the amount of training data they can scrape
That's only a limitation for LLMs, which are trained on text.
Human babies develop common sense by interacting with the world, not by reading texts.
> massive power consumption of data centres
AI consumes 1.5% of electricity. There's plenty of room for growth. The new chips are much more energy efficient.
> local utilities struggling to supply those energy requirements
Some utilities struggle. Others are very happy to have a reliable 24/7 customer. Some data centers have agreements to reduce their consumption when electricity demand peaks.
> and shortages of water causing problems
That's a problem in Arizona. It's not a problem in Iceland or the PNW.
Re: vc is getting impatient (Score:2)
Just give him the $3 trillion he asked for! And he'll make it happen!
Re: (Score:2)
It's a conveniently vague time interval. It's short enough that everyone needs to plan for how to incorporate Altman's company's services into their business, but not soon enough that he can be held accountable for it failing to show up on schedule. Also, hopefully long enough in the future to give people time to forget the prediction when it turns out to be wrong. In other words, it should be ready in time to use on our fusion-powered Mars colony.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, about 4,000 days from now is when I've been predicting it for, plus or minus about 750 days. That's about 11 years from now, and I've been predicting "around 2035" for over a decade. With sizeable error bars.
OTOH, what I've been predicting is a "basic AGI", not a super intelligent system. Just one that can learn to be.