Sam Altman. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images
Nearly two years ago, OpenAI said that artificial general intelligence — the thing the company was created to build — could “elevate humanity” and “give everyone incredible new capabilities.”
Now, CEO Sam Altman is trying to lower expectations.
“My guess is we will hit AGI sooner than most people in the world think and it matter much less,” he said during an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times DealBook Summit on Wednesday. “And a lot of the safety concerns that we and others expressed actually don’t come at the AGI moment. AGI can get built, the world mostly goes on in mostly the same way, things grow faster, but then there is a long continuation from what we call AGI to what we call super intelligence.”
This isn’t the first time Altman has downplayed the now-seemingly-imminent arrival of AGI, which OpenAI’s charter once said will be able to “automate the great majority of intellectual labor.” He has recently teased that it could arrive as soon as 2025 and will be achievable on existing hardware. We at The Verge have heard OpenAI intends to weave together its large language models and declare that to be AGI.
At the DealBook Summit, Altman made it sound…
