It appears that even the voices at the forefront of the current AI revolution aren’t completely sure if we’ve reached the singularity.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has posted a cryptic six-word story on X, which hints that we might have already reached the singularity, or the era where machines become more intelligent than humans, which leads to a self-perpetuating cycle of technological expansion which can occur in unforeseen ways. “i always wanted to write a six-word story. here it is: near the singularity; unclear which side,” Altman posted on X.
“It’s supposed to either be about 1. the simulation hypothesis or 2. the impossibility of knowing when the critical moment in the takeoff actually happens, but i like that it works in a lot of other ways too,” he explained in a follow-on post.
There are multiple ways of interpreting Altman’s six-word story. The easier way is his second option: he says that it’s easy to see that we’re near the singularity, it’s hard to know whether we’re approaching it or have already passed it and are beyond it. Altman seems to be saying that current AI systems might already be sophisticated enough to be considered to be the singularity, and it could be impossible for us to tell when exactly we reach the singularity point. We’re either really close to getting there, or have already gotten there, and the impact of current technological progress will become more apparent in the coming years.
The other way to interpret Altman’s post is through the simulation hypothesis. Simulation hypothesis says that the current world we live in has been simulated by a more advanced civilization, much like we’ve created computer games, and we’re characters in one such video game. The singularity in this context might mean that the characters in the game end up creating something as powerful as the game itself, and realize that they’re in a game. This could be seen as “winning” or “ending” the game they’re in.
It’s not surprising that Sam Altman believes we’re close to the singularity. Over the last few months, AI has made several advancements which until a few years ago would’ve been taken to be definite proof of the singularity. OpenAI’s o3 model has obtained a rank of 175 on Competition Code, which means that’s it’s better than all but 174 human coders at this point. The model also scored 96 percent on a feeder test for the US team for the International Mathematics Olympiad, and also an impressive 25 percent on Research Math, which is a test with extremely hard questions that only top mathematicians can solve. There have also been rapid advancements made in video generation, such as by Google’s Veo2, and even in other fields like medicine and law. And amid all this frenetic progress, Altman seems to be saying that there’s no telling whether we’ve already passed the singularity point.