As 2024 comes to a close, top AI labs including OpenAI (and by extension Microsoft), Google, Anthropic, and others are gaining ground in the AI arms race. For example, OpenAI just finished its “12-day shipping period” and is offering a number of services, including a successor to OpenAI 01 with advanced inference capabilities, and a new $200 subscription tier for advanced AI models called ChatGPT Pro. announced the product.
There were few announcements, but the most notable was speculation that AGI (artificial general intelligence) might arrive sooner than expected. Over the past few months, new reports have been published stating that AI could lead to the extinction of humanity, and prominent AI safety researchers believe that unless progress is halted, AI will inevitably predicts a 99.9% chance of failure.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently shared some interesting insights about AGI in an interview on The Free Press YouTube channel (via @tsarnick of X). According to executives,
“If the rate of scientific progress happening around the world tripled, maybe even tenfold, discoveries we once expected to take 10 years, technologies we once expected to take 10 years to develop,” he says. If this kind of progress were to happen every year, then one year, and then the next, and then the next, it seemed to me that superintelligence had arrived.
AGI and superintelligence won’t change what we fundamentally value
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Superintelligence and AGI are not the same thing. The former constitutes a powerful AI system, capable of outperforming humans in terms of unlimited memory, advanced reasoning ability, speed, etc., and thus replaces the capabilities of AGI. An OpenAI technical employee said the AI company’s OpenAI o1 public release is equivalent to AGI.
Interestingly, Sam Altman has previously suggested that AGI will pass with surprisingly little impact on society. He added that the safety concerns raised about the rapid advancement of AI will not arise in the time of AGI, and that the path from AGI to superintelligence is long.
Sam Altman admits that superintelligence will revolutionize the way society and the economy work. But he argues that the fundamental human desires remain the same, including what we tend to care about and what drives us. “But the world we exist in will be very different.”
