OpenAI CEO: We may have AI superintelligence in “a few thousand days”

On Monday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman outlined his vision for an AI-driven future of tech progress and global prosperity in a new personal blog post titled "The Intelligence Age." The essay paints a picture of human advancement accelerated by AI, with Altman suggesting that superintelligent AI could emerge within the next decade.

OpenAI's current goal is to create AGI (artificial general intelligence), which is a term for hypothetical technology that could match human intelligence in performing many tasks without the need for specific training. In contrast, superintelligence surpasses AGI, and it could be seen as a hypothetical level of machine intelligence that can dramatically outperform humans at any intellectual task, perhaps even to an unfathomable degree.

Superintelligence (sometimes called "ASI" for "artificial superintelligence") is a popular but sometimes fringe topic among the machine learning community, and it has been for years—especially since controversial philosopher Nick Bostrom authored a book titled Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies in 2014. Former OpenAI co-founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI in June to found a company with the term in its name: Safe Superintelligence. Meanwhile, Altman himself has been talking about developing superintelligence since at least last year.