Open AI CEO Sam Altman has written a new blog post titled The Intelligence Age, offering a heady, optimistic viewpoint about the future of AI. He opens by predicting that, “In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents.” He continues:

“It won’t happen all at once, but we’ll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI; eventually we can each have a personal AI team, full of virtual experts in different areas, working together to create almost anything we can imagine.

Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need. We can imagine similar ideas for better healthcare, the ability to create any kind of software someone can imagine, and much more. With these new abilities, we can have shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today.

In 15 words: deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale,
and we dedicated increasing resources to it.
Sam Altman

That’s really it; humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying ‘rules’ that produce any distribution of data). To a shocking degree of precision, the more compute and data available, the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems. I find that no matter how much time I spend thinking about this, I can never really internalize how consequential it is.

Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy, and human will.

I hope our business and government leaders are listening this time.”