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Tuesday, January 7, 2025

OpenAI shifts focus from AGI to superintelligence

Altman predicts superintelligence could arrive within a “few thousand days,” potentially making its impact felt within this decade.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the company’s pivot toward developing superintelligence, a concept surpassing the capabilities of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Altman revealed this shift in focus through a recent blog post, signaling a transformative phase for the company and its vision for the future of AI.

What is Superintelligence?

Superintelligence, as OpenAI envisions it, refers to AI systems with capabilities exceeding those of humans across most tasks. Altman predicts these tools could dramatically accelerate scientific discoveries, spark innovation, and usher in an era of unprecedented abundance and prosperity.

Read More: Former OpenAI Employee Who Accused Company of Copyright

“We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future,” Altman wrote, emphasizing the immense potential of these systems. However, superintelligence is distinct from AGI, which OpenAI defines as highly autonomous systems that outperform humans in most economically valuable work.

Microsoft, OpenAI’s key investor and collaborator, measures AGI differently—as AI capable of generating $100 billion in profits. Per a contractual agreement, achieving this milestone would end Microsoft’s access to OpenAI’s technology. While Altman didn’t specify which definition of AGI he was referencing, he suggested the former seemed more relevant.

Timelines and Challenges

Altman predicts superintelligence could arrive within a “few thousand days,” potentially making its impact felt within this decade. However, critics argue this timeline is overly optimistic. IBM’s Brent Smolinski, for instance, considers such predictions exaggerated, citing the current limitations of AI, such as its dependency on massive datasets, restricted capabilities, and lack of self-awareness.

These challenges are compounded by existing AI weaknesses, including hallucinations, errors, and high operational costs. Despite these hurdles, Altman expressed confidence in overcoming them rapidly, asserting that AI systems could soon “join the workforce” and significantly enhance company output.

Safety Concerns Amid Rapid Development

OpenAI has long acknowledged the risks of transitioning to a world with superintelligence. In 2023, the company admitted it lacked solutions for reliably controlling or aligning superintelligent systems with human values. “[H]umans won’t be able to reliably supervise AI systems much smarter than us, and so our current alignment techniques will not scale to superintelligence,” OpenAI stated in a July 2023 blog post.

Efforts to address these concerns were undermined when OpenAI disbanded its dedicated superintelligence safety team later that year. Several key researchers departed, citing the company’s increasing focus on commercial ambitions over safety. This restructuring raises questions about whether OpenAI is adequately prioritizing the ethical and practical challenges of superintelligence.

Read More: OpenAI prepares ChatGPT for real-time video interaction

As part of its vision, OpenAI foresees AI agents—semi-autonomous systems capable of executing tasks independently—joining the workforce as early as 2025. These agents could revolutionize industries, with software development expected to be among the first to benefit. By 2028, analysts predict agentic AI will be integrated into a significant portion of enterprise software applications, potentially transforming decision-making processes and customer interactions.