OpenAI CEO Sam Altman expects artificial intelligence to clear a historic hurdle in less than five years. The ChatGPT founder predicted artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence by 2030.
In an interview with the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network this week, Altman said the strides made by machine intelligence in the last three years have him convinced that the remaining tasks that humans are still better at will not be an issue.
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“I would certainly say that by the end of this decade, by 2030, if we don’t have extraordinarily capable models that do things that we ourselves cannot do, I’d be very surprised,” Altman said in the interview transcribed by Business Insider.
He said his latest iteration of AI, GPT5, is smarter than him in many ways but still lacks the ability to “a lot of things that humans could do easily.”
Artificial general intelligence
This gap between humans and AI is referred to as “general intelligence,” which is a very human trait of taking information and applying it in novel situations. Creativity is a core trait of general intelligence. The most prominent test of this type of intelligence is the “abstraction and reasoning corpus,” or ARC test. The test was introduced in a 2019 paper and describes it as skill acquisition on unknown tasks.
Scientific American said in a July article that artificial general intelligence is still a major stumbling block for machine learning programs like ChatGPT.
The way of the wagon wheel
An often-examined issue with the emergence of AI is what jobs it will make obsolete. When asked, Altman instead referred to what AI would, or wouldn’t, do instead of human workers as tasks.
“I can easily imagine a world where 30 to 40% of the tasks that happen in the economy today get done by AI in the not very distant future,” he said, noting that many of the careers that existed 30 years ago aren’t around today.
Machine overlords
Altman was asked about a common movie premise; the possibility of artificial intelligence turning against humanity.
“I believe that this tool will be enormously capable,” he said. “Even if it has no intentionality, asking it to do something could have consequences we don’t understand. So, it is very important that we align it with human values.”
