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Brace yourself: Superintelligent AI is on its way
Let me tell you a little about Sam Altman, one of the leading figures pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence. He’s 39, from Chicago and worth about $1 billion, give or take. He dropped out of Stanford after two years to start Loopt, a location-based social media app that sold for $43.4 million in 2005.
Afterward, he played a big role in putting together the money and people for Dropbox, Airbnb and Stripe, and he got a piece of the action for each one. In 2015, Altman founded OpenAI with Elon Musk. They butted heads on OpenAI’s strategy, Musk left in 2018, and Altman became OpenAI’s CEO in 2019.
His daily driver? A gorgeous red McLaren P1, valued at around $20 million. I know this firsthand; I see him in it from time to time. Oh, and he says a psychedelic retreat in Mexico cured him of anxiety.
Now, back to AI. Sam Altman predicts a game-changing, superintelligent form of AI will take over our lives and interact with us in as little as “a few thousand days.” That’s eight to ten years from now.
Triumph of intelligence over imagination
The AI we use today can do things like translate languages, play chess and compile info. It relies on data that’s been uploaded and the human-written algorithms that control it. But we’re also pretty darn close to AGI, or artificial general intelligence. AGI matches human intelligence and performs tasks without training.
The next step up from AGI is what’s called “superintelligence,” and this is what Sam Altman expects within the next decade. With superintelligent AI, we’re talking about something capable of solving longstanding scientific mysteries, curing all diseases and creating truly unique works of art — not just versions of things it’s already seen.
As you might expect, superintelligence is terrifying within the machine-learning world. Some scientists are committing their work to developing a superintelligence to protect us non-bots. We definitely need that.
Welcome to your new life
From 1870 to 1914, the Industrial Age changed lives dramatically with railroads, electricity, combustion engines and a push to move to cities to work in factories. Altman has called the time we’re in now the “Intelligence Age,” and he’s right — you have to know we’re on the verge of something that will change the world forever.
The next level of AI will bring AI assistants and even “personal AI teams” to make our lives a whole lot easier, Altman predicts. That goes beyond AI doing your laundry and scheduling meetings; we could be looking at massive breakthroughs in fields like health care, education and software development.
A wise man once said …
… Nothing; he only listened. Curing cancer and preventing dementia sounds amazing, but let’s not forget what constitutes being “smart.” Possessing lots of knowledge is a must. Altman says ChatGPT will have digested all human knowledge that’s existed since the beginning of time, so to speak, within about two years.
But that knowledge is more or less taken without the consent of those who created it to begin with, making much of what ChatGPT tells you stolen and plagiarized. The algorithm just isn’t smart enough to know it’s stealing.
There’s another big component to intelligence. Without the ability to understand and experience happiness and joy, sorrow, grief, rage, forgiveness, compassion, and empathy, it’s not very “smart.” In fact, without these qualities, AI will very, very likely hurt us all one day.
Proceed with caution
Although Altman is jazzed about the future of AI, others in the field say it’s not all sunshine and “smart” rainbows. Critics argue all AI does is boost company valuations, get us all excited and distract from the real work happening in the tech world.
That’s a good point, because if AI is going to make it into the hands of as many people as possible, we’ll need the right infrastructure to make it happen. Without that, Alman says, it’ll be “mostly a tool for rich people.”
We’ve got a ways to go. Right now, one AI search uses four to five times more energy than a standard Google search.
Love is all you need
Nope — you also need water and rations. I find it interesting Altman’s a doomsday prepper. He’s mentioned in several interviews he’s prepared for potential future global disasters by investing in survival supplies and even land in remote locations. I have supplies on hand, too, just in case.
Do you think AI superintelligence will be a good thing for humanity? I’d love to know your thoughts. Drop a note here on my site.
⏱️ I’m setting a countdown clock for 1,000 days. I’ll update you then! Or maybe my army of Kimbots will …
Tags: apps, Google, social media, tech
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