We already knew what OpenAI CEO Sam Altman thought about the position of artificial intelligence vis-à-vis the human story. It will be transformative, historic, and overwhelmingly beneficial. He has remained consistent throughout countless interviews. For some reason, this week he felt the need to distill these opinions into a concise blog post. What he calls the “Age of Intelligence” will be an era of abundance. “We have been able to share a level of prosperity that is unimaginable today. In the future, everyone’s life could be better than anyone’s life today,” he wrote. I am. “It will happen in stages, but amazing victories such as repairing the climate, establishing space colonies, and discovering all kinds of physics will eventually become commonplace.”
Perhaps he published this to challenge a train of thought that dismisses the apparent advances in large-scale language models as something like an illusion. No, um, he says. We get this big AI bonus, he said in an interview later this week, mocking those who say that programs like OpenAI’s GPT4o are just stupid engines that deliver the next token in the queue. Because, as he said, “deep learning works.” “Even if unproven mathematical theorems start being proven, do we really still want to argue, ‘Oh, but is it just predicting the next token?'” he says.
No matter what you think about Sam Altman, there’s no doubt that this is his truth. Artificial general intelligence, or AI that matches and even exceeds human capabilities, will wipe out the problems plaguing humanity and usher in a golden age. We propose to name this deus ex machina concept the “Strawberry Shortcut” after the codename for a recent breakthrough in artificial inference in OpenAI. Like shortcake, it looks delicious, but when you eat it, it’s not that filling.
Altman rightly points out that advances in technology have made things that were once luxuries available to everyday people, including things that were unavailable to pharaohs and feudal lords. Charlemagne never liked air conditioning. Working-class people, even people on welfare, have dishwashers, giant-screen TVs, iPhones, and delivery services that deliver pumpkin lattes and pet food to their homes. However, Altman has not acknowledged the full story. Despite great wealth, not everyone is prosperous, and many are homeless or in extreme poverty. In the words of William Gibson, paradise is here, it’s just not evenly distributed. It’s not because technology failed, it’s because we failed. I suspect the same will be true as AGI comes along, especially since so many jobs will be automated.
Altman is less specific about what life will be like when many of our current jobs take the path of 18th-century lamplighters. This week, we got a glimpse of his vision in a podcast where he asked tech luminaries and luminaries to share their Spotify playlists. When explaining why he chose the song “Underwater” by Rufus du Sol, Altman said it was an homage to Burning Man, which he has attended several times. He said the festival is “part of the post-AGI world, where people are focused on doing things for each other, caring for each other, and making great gifts for each other.” I am.
Altman is a big fan of universal basic income and seems to think it would soften the blow of wage losses. While artificial intelligence may indeed create the wealth to realize such plans, there is no evidence that those who have built wealth, or even those who are still living modest lives, are more likely to accept the concept. There are almost no Altman may have had a great experience at Burning Man, but some kind-hearted people on the Playa say they’ll tax a portion of their unrealized capital gains, which only affects people worth more than $100 million. He seems to be angry at the suggestion. It’s a questionable premise that such people, or people who have become very rich working for AI companies, would break open their vaults and fund the leisure of the masses. One can only imagine how populist agitators would view UBI, as one of the major political parties in the United States cannot stand Medicaid.
I’m also wary of the big bucks that will come when all the big problems are solved. Let’s acknowledge that AI has the potential to actually solve humanity’s biggest challenges. We humans need to actually implement these solutions, and that’s where we fail time and time again. We don’t need a massive language model to tell us that war is hell and we shouldn’t kill each other. Yet wars continue to occur.
