Sam Altman's latest blog post: The AI ​​era brings infinite intelligence

Source: Newin

On September 23, Sam Altman published a blog post titled "The Intelligence Age". Altman emphasized that future technological advances will allow us to achieve achievements that seem almost "magic" to our ancestors, and the accelerated innovation of AI will become the core force driving these changes.

Altman explained that the reason why humans have become more and more capable in history is not because our own genes have changed, but because the social infrastructure has become smarter and more powerful.

AI will further enhance this, providing humans with new tools to help us solve problems that were previously unsolvable and promote further prosperity in society.

He believes that we will gradually transition to an era where everyone can have a personalized AI assistant, and these virtual assistants will not only assist us in our daily work, but also bring disruptive changes - from healthcare to education to software development.

One of his core points is that "deep learning works". Altman outlines the key factors for the progress of AI in concise language - the success of deep learning technology and its predictable progress in the process of continuous expansion. This breakthrough will make AI more and more capable in solving complex problems, thereby promoting the continued development of science, technology and economy.

In addition, Altman also described a hopeful "Intelligent Age": the solution to the climate crisis, the establishment of space colonies, and the comprehensive exploration of physics will become "ordinary things" that may be achieved in the future.

He believes that humans are about to enter a new era with almost unlimited intelligence and energy, which will make great ideas and creativity easier to implement and promote global common prosperity.

The following is the full content of this article, enjoy~

In the next few decades, we will be able to do things that seemed like magic to our grandparents.

This phenomenon is not new, but it will be further accelerated. Over time, human capabilities have increased significantly; we have been able to accomplish some things that our predecessors thought were impossible.

We are more capable not because of genetic changes, but because we benefit from a social infrastructure that is far smarter and more capable than we are as individuals; in an important sense, society itself is a form of advanced intelligence.

Our grandparents—and generations before them—created and accomplished great things. They contributed to the scaffolding of human progress, and we all benefit from it.

AI will give people the tools to solve difficult problems, and help us add new pillars to this scaffolding, helping us solve some of the problems we couldn’t solve on our own. The story of progress will continue, and our children will be able to do things we couldn’t do on our own.

It won’t happen overnight, but we will soon be able to work with AI to help us do more of what we can’t do on our own; eventually, each of us will have a personal AI team of virtual experts in different fields, 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 any pace they need. We can envision similar ideas applied to better health care, creating software that anyone can imagine, and much more.

With these new capabilities, we could have a kind of shared prosperity that seems unimaginable today; a future where everyone can live better than anyone does today.

While prosperity alone won’t necessarily make people happy—there are many miserable people among the rich—it will significantly improve the lives of people around the world.

This is a narrow way to look at human history: after thousands of years of scientific discovery and technological progress, we’ve figured out how to melt sand, add some impurities, and then arrange it into computer chips with amazing precision at extremely small scales, run energy through those chips, and create increasingly capable AI systems.

This may be the most important fact about history so far. We may have super AI in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I believe we’ll get there.

How did we get to the threshold of this leap forward in prosperity?

In three words: deep learning works.

In fifteen words: Deep learning works, and it gets predictably better as it scales and we throw more and more resources at it.

That’s all there is to it; humans have discovered an algorithm that can truly learn any data distribution (or, really, the underlying “rules” that produce any data distribution). Amazingly, the more computing power and data there is, the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems. No matter how much time I spend thinking about this, I can never quite internalize its significance.

We still have many details to figure out, but it would be a mistake to get distracted by any particular challenge. Deep learning works, and we’ll solve the rest. We can say a lot about what might come next, but the main point is that AI will get better as it scales, and that will improve the lives of people around the world.

AI models will soon serve as autonomous personal assistants, performing specific tasks for us, like coordinating our medical care. At some point in the future, AI systems will become so powerful that they will help us create better next-generation systems and drive scientific progress in every field.

Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the road to the Intelligent Age is paved with computing power, energy, and human will.

If we want to put AI in the hands of as many people as possible, we need to make computing cheaper and more abundant (which requires a lot of energy and chips). If we don't build enough infrastructure, AI will become a very limited resource that may cause wars and become primarily a tool for the rich.

We need to act wisely but firmly. The dawn of the Intelligent Age is a major advance that comes with extremely complex and high-stakes challenges. It won't be an entirely positive story, but its potential is huge, and we have a responsibility to ourselves and the future to address the risks before us.

I believe the future will be so bright that no one can really express it through writing; a defining feature of the Intelligent Age will be great prosperity.

While this will all happen gradually, amazing triumphs like climate repair, space colonies, and sweeping discoveries in physics will eventually become commonplace.

With nearly limitless intelligence and abundant energy—the ability to come up with great ideas, and the power to make those ideas come to fruition—there are a lot of things we can do.

As we’ve seen with other technologies, there will be downsides, too, so we need to start working now to maximize the benefits of AI while minimizing its harms.

For example, we expect this technology to have a significant impact on the labor market in the coming years (both good and bad), but most jobs will change more slowly than most people expect, and I’m not worried that we’ll run out of things to do (even if they don’t look like “real jobs” today).

Humans have an innate desire to create and be useful to each other, and AI will augment our abilities like never before. As a society, we’ll once again be in an extended world, and we can refocus on positive-sum games.

Many of the jobs we do today would have seemed like a meaningless waste of time to people hundreds of years ago, but no one looked back and longed to be a lamplighter.

If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would find the prosperity around him unimaginable. And if we could fast forward to today, a hundred years from now, the prosperity around us would be equally incredible.