In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek published on Monday, Altman said he once came up with a “totally random” date for when OpenAI would build artificial general intelligence (AGI), and that AI would It was acknowledged that this is the theoretical threshold for exceeding intelligence. That will be in 2025. 10 years have passed since the company was established.
Altman’s candor about this mistake was momentarily refreshing, but he made another prediction in the same interview, saying, “AGI will probably be developed during this president’s term.” said. He made an even bigger claim in a personal blog post on Monday. This year, AI “agents” will join the workforce and “sharply change the way companies produce.”
Altman has become a master at balancing humility and hype. He will acknowledge past speculations while making new, equally speculative predictions about the future, creating a confusing cocktail of distractions from thorny current issues. Take everything he says with a pinch of salt.
Technology company leaders have long tried to sell us a mirage of the future. Elon Musk claimed to have self-driving taxis on the roads by 2020, and Steve Jobs was famously mocked for his “reality distortion field.”
But Altman’s strategic ambiguity is more sophisticated. Because he mixes his assertions with apparent candor, such as tweeting on Monday that OpenAI is losing money because its premium service is so popular, and acknowledging earlier speculation about AGI. Body. Doing so may make other predictions and claims more reliable.
The stakes are different from those of Mr. Musk, who sold cars and rockets, and Mr. Jobs, who sold consumer products. Mr. Altman is marketing software that has the potential to change the education and employment of millions of people, just as the Internet itself has changed almost everything, and his prediction is that no one will be left behind. It could help guide the decisions of fearful companies and governments.
For example, one of the risks is that regulation could be weakened. AI safety institutes have been established in several countries in 2024, including the US, UK, Japan, Canada, and Singapore, but global oversight could be set back this year. Eurasia Group, a policy research firm founded by American political scientist Ian Bremer, cites the loosening of AI regulations as one of the biggest risks in 2025.
Bremer said US President-elect Donald Trump is likely to rescind President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI, and that the UK-backed International AI Safety Summit Series will be held in Paris this year by calling the “AI Action Summit”. (It is also home to promising startups like Mistral AI).
In a way, Altman’s comments about AGI’s impending arrival point to “safety” at these summits, since it seems harder to set up meaningful oversight when things are moving this fast. It helps justify the shift from “action” to “action.”
The message will be: “This is happening so fast that traditional regulatory frameworks will not work.” And Altman is inconsistent in how he talks about AI safety.
He talked about its importance in a blog post on Monday, but downplayed it in an interview with New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin at the Dealbook Summit in December, saying: The AGI moment will not come. It’s like if we could build AGI, the world would still move on in much the same way. The economy moves faster and things grow faster. ”
That makes sense for a political leader already leaning toward light regulation, like Trump, to whom Altman donated $1 million to his inaugural fund. The problem is that the promise of a bright future constantly distracts from immediate issues, such as the impending disruption that AI will bring to labor, education, and the creative arts, as well as the bias and security issues that generative AI still suffers from. That’s it.
Asked by Bloomberg about the energy consumption of AI, Altman quickly brought up untested new technology as an answer. “Nuclear fusion will work,” he replied, referring to the still theoretical process of extracting large-scale power from nuclear fusion.
“Soon,” he added. “Well, there will soon be a demonstration of net gain fusion.” Coincidentally, nuclear fusion has been the subject of overly optimistic predictions for decades, and in this case Altman himself It used nuclear fusion as a means to deflect issues that threatened to curb its ambitions.
Altman appears to be operating a more sophisticated iteration of the Silicon Valley hype machine. This matters because he’s not just selling a service, he’s shaping how companies and policymakers view AI at key moments, especially when it comes to regulation.
He says AGI will emerge during President Trump’s term, but the world will go on. There is no need for excessive checks and balances. That’s far from the truth. ©Bloomberg
