November 06, 2024 – Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has long harbored a passion for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and has been vocal about his company’s pursuit of this ambitious goal. In a recent Reddit AMA session, Altman asserted that achieving AGI is possible with existing hardware, albeit without specifying the exact requirements. Previously, he had mentioned that realizing his AI vision would entail an investment of 7 trillion dollars and several years to construct 36 semiconductor factories and numerous data centers.
It’s noteworthy that Altman had previously stated in a blog post that superintelligence is “only a few thousand days away.” However, it appears that he may have refined his timeline for achieving AGI, narrowing it down to just 5 years.
In a recent interview, Altman forecasted that the advancements in AI technology over the next five years will be incredibly rapid. He suggested that the moment of AGI might arrive quietly, without people even realizing it. Despite this, he predicted that the short-term impact of AI and AGI on society “will be surprisingly small.” As an example, he cited the Turing test, noting that if people were asked five years ago whether a computer would pass the test, they would have said no. Although the computer ultimately did pass the test, it didn’t lead to significant societal changes.
Nevertheless, Altman acknowledged that in the long run, the AI revolution could bring about fundamental societal transformations along with rapid scientific progress, exceeding all expectations.
