Altman: Artificial general intelligence will arrive during Trump’s time
The OpenAI CEO admitted to moving the goalposts as to what that means, however.
In a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reflected on his tumultuous leadership during the young company’s most consequential moments, and shed light on the progress of company’s quest for its Holy Grail: AGI, or artificial general intelligence.
Filling in some details of early OpenAI lore, Altman decided to release the first version of ChatGPT against the advice of his team:
“‘Why are you making us launch this? It’s a bad decision. It’s not ready.’ I don't make a lot of ‘we’re gonna do this thing’ decisions, but this was one of them.”
Altman said he told the team, “I think we have something on our hands that we do not appreciate here.”
Defining exactly what AGI means is slippery, and Altman admits to moving the goalposts.
“Can it start as a computer program and decide it wants to become a doctor? Can it do what the best people in the field can do or the 98th percentile? How autonomous is it? I don’t have deep, precise answers there yet, but if you could hire an AI as a remote employee to be a great software engineer, I think a lot of people would say, ‘OK, that’s AGI-ish.’”
Altman predicted that AGI will be achieved during the new Trump admin, and he didn’t make much of his $1 million personal donation to Trump’s inaugural committee. “He’s the president of the United States. I support any president.”
That said, he did not donate to Biden’s inauguration.
When asked about the potential risks of ChatGPT’s misuse, such as being used to develop bioweapons, Altman wants to move fast and break things:
“I can simultaneously think that these risks are real and also believe that the only way to appropriately address them is to ship product and learn.”
Altman said the company has been working hard with partners like Nvidia to secure enough GPUs for its voracious computing needs, and is working on its own chips as well.
As for powering all these energy-hungry data centers that OpenAI relies on, Altman would prefer to use nuclear fusion, which has yet to be commercialized at scale (though Altman is bullish on his fusion startup, Helion).
Altman’s recent squabbles with OpenAI cofounder Elon Musk have drawn a lot of attention, including Musk’s lawsuits seeking to block OpenAI’s restructuring to a for-profit company.
When asked about the threat of Musk’s newfound power as Trump’s adviser and buddy:
“The question was, will he abuse his political power of being co-president, or whatever he calls himself now, to mess with a business competitor? I don’t think he’ll do that. I genuinely don’t. May turn out to be proven wrong.”
