Strong AI will not be the salvation for humanity – we will have to wait for superintelligence, says the head of OpenAI

About two years ago, OpenAI said that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), also called strong AI or human-level AI, “can elevate humanity” and “bring incredible new capabilities to everyone.” Now OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is trying to lower expectations for AGI.

Image source: OpenAI Forum

«My guess is that we will reach AGI sooner than most people in the world think, and it will matter much less. And many of the security concerns that we and others have raised will not actually arise when AGI is created. AGI can be created. The world after this will basically develop in much the same way as it does now. Some things will start to happen faster. But going from what we call AGI to what we call superintelligence is a very long road,” Altman said during an interview at The New York Times DealBook Summit on Wednesday.

This is not the first time Altman has downplayed the seemingly inevitable creation of general-purpose artificial intelligence, which was once discussed in the charter of the OpenAI company itself, and which, as it stated, would be able to “automate most of the intellectual work” of humanity. Recently, the head of OpenAI hinted that this could happen as early as 2025 and would be achievable with the latest specialized software and hardware. There are rumors that OpenAI will simply combine all of its large language models and call it AGI.

Altman’s subsequent statement about AGI sounded as if OpenAI no longer viewed the creation of general-purpose artificial intelligence as something grandiose that could solve all of humanity’s problems: “It seems to me that the economic difficulties in the world will continue a little longer than people think because that there is a lot of inertia in society. So in the first couple of years [after the creation of AGI], there probably won’t be much change. And then, perhaps, many changes will follow.”

The hopes and potential achievements that OpenAI previously attributed to AGI are now pinned by the company on so-called “superintelligence,” which Altman recently predicted could appear “in a few thousand days.”