Over the last few years, technologists had been debating over whether humanity would ever create AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, which would surpass humans on most tasks. But now a leader of the AI revolution says they know how to get to AGI — it’s just a matter of putting in the work.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that his company now knows what to do to get to Artificial General Intelligence. “This is the first time ever where I felt like we actually know what to do. Like, I think from here to building an AGI will still take a huge amount of work. There are some known unknowns, but I think we basically know what to go do. It’ll take a while and it’ll be hard, but that’s tremendously exciting,” he said on a podcast.
Altman said that the clarity the team had on how to achieve AGI was helping it move quickly. “I think on the product side, there’s more to figure out, but roughly we know what to shoot at and what we want to optimize for. That’s a really exciting time. And when you have that clarity, I think you can go pretty fast. If you’re willing to say, we’re going to do these few things, we’re going to try to do them very well. Our research path is fairly clear. Our infrastructure path is fairly clear. Our product path is getting clearer. You can orient around that super well,” he added.
“I had been telling people for a while, I thought that the level two to level three jump was going to happen. But then the level two to level three was going to happen quickly, but the level three to level four jump was somehow going to be much harder and require some medium sized or larger new ideas,” Altman said. Levels 2, 3 and 4 are progressively advanced forms of AI, which ultimately lead to AGI.
“But (I’m now) convinced that you can get a huge amount of innovation just by using these current models in really creative ways. I think things are going to go a lot faster than people are appreciating right now,” he added. This implies that Altman believes that there were no major discoveries or innovations the necessarily needed to be completed before AGI was achieved.
Altman has previously said that AGI was within reach. In September, Altman had said that he believed that “superintelligence”, or AGI, would be achieved in a few thousand days, which translated to somewhere between 8 and 13 years. And with Altman now saying that his company knows what to do to achieve AGI, the path to AGI seems to be looking clearer than ever.