AI bot ChatGPT will be smarter than any human on Earth ‘in a few thousand days’ as boss issues spooky update
CHATGPT, a groundbreaking artificially intelligent (AI) chatbot, will be smarter than any human on Earth “in a few thousand days”, according to its creator.
It will be like the dawn of the internet – on steroids.
In a personal blog post titled “The Intelligence Age“, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote: “It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there.
“How did we get to the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity? In three words: deep learning worked.”
Artificial superintelligence is a hypothetical machine learning system with an intellectual scope beyond the smartest, and most gifted humans on Earth.
University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom defines machine superintelligence as “any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest”.
Altman's ambiguous timeline for the emergence of AI super-intelligence gives his company some leeway when it comes to developing the tech.
Ultimately, it depends on your definition of “a few”.
But it sounds like he thinks it could happen within a decade.
For example, 2,000 days is about 5.5 years, 3,000 days is around 8.2 years, and 4,000 days is almost 11 years.
‘Like magic’
OpenAI only unveiled ChatGPT in November 2022.
Yet the chatbot’s launch has had a profound influence on the evolution of AI.
“In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents,” Altman continued.
Altman envisions a future where every person will have a “personal AI team, full of virtual experts” to help us complete tasks more efficiently.
Superintelligent machines may also help humans learn skills they couldn’t before, like becoming fluent in a new language with the help of an on-hand virtual tutor.
He suggests AI models will “soon” serve as autonomous personal assistants who carry out specific tasks on our behalf, in a real hands-off approach towards human autonomy.
According to Altman, “humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any” information with a “shocking degree of precision”.
AI could also be used to solve problems humans haven’t figured out yet when it comes to things like establishing space colonies and discovering new physics.
It comes as OpenAI rolls out a new Advanced Voice Mode to ChatGPT’s paying customers, which allows users to speak quite naturally with the AI bot.
OpenAI aims to put AI into the hands of “as many people as possible”, according to Altman, which means bringing the cost of energy and computer chips down.
‘High-stakes challenges’
While he paints a rosy image of the future, Altman isn’t oblivious to the “extremely high-stakes challenges” that come with letting super-intelligent AI loose into the world.
He wrote: “It will not be an entirely positive story, but the upside is so tremendous that we owe it to ourselves, and the future, to figure out how to navigate the risks in front of us.
“As we have seen with other technologies, there will also be downsides, and we need to start working now to maximize AI’s benefits while minimizing its harms.”
Experts are concerned that further embedding AI into society may lead to mass unemployment, as machines replace humans in certain jobs, like bookkeeping and data analysis.
But as Altman puts it, there are hundreds of modern jobs that would look like “trifling wastes of time” to people a few hundred years ago.
“Nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter,” he continued.
“If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable.
“And if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable.”
What are the arguments against AI?
Artificial intelligence is a highly contested issue, and it seems everyone has a stance on it. Here are some common arguments against it:
Loss of jobs – Some industry experts argue that AI will create new niches in the job market, and as some roles are eliminated, others will appear. However, many artists and writers insist the argument is ethical, as generative AI tools are being trained on their work and wouldn’t function otherwise.
Ethics – When AI is trained on a dataset, much of the content is taken from the internet. This is almost always, if not exclusively, done without notifying the people whose work is being taken.
Privacy – Content from personal social media accounts may be fed to language models to train them. Concerns have cropped up as Meta unveils its AI assistants across platforms like Facebook and Instagram. There have been legal challenges to this: in 2016, legislation was created to protect personal data in the EU, and similar laws are in the works in the United States.
Misinformation – As AI tools pull information from the internet, they may take things out of context or suffer hallucinations that produce nonsensical answers. Tools like Copilot on Bing and Google’s generative AI in search are always at risk of getting things wrong. Some critics argue this could have lethal effects – such as AI prescribing the wrong health information.