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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 explains that humans have historically become more capable not because our own genes have changed, but because our social infrastructure has become smarter and more powerful.

ai will further enhance this, providing humanity with entirely new tools to help us solve previously unsolvable problems and drive further prosperity as a society.

he believes that we will gradually transition to an era where everyone will have a personalized ai assistant that 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 outlined the key factors for ai progress in concise language: deep learning is a technology that has succeeded and continues to make predictable progress in scale. this breakthrough will enable ai to become increasingly capable of solving complex problems, thereby promoting the continued development of science, technology, and the economy.

altman also describes a hopeful "smart age" in which solving the climate crisis, establishing space colonies, and fully exploring physics will become "normal" things that are possible in the future.

he believes that mankind is 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 would have seemed like magic to our grandparents.

this phenomenon is not new, but it is set to accelerate even further. human capabilities have increased dramatically over time; we have been able to accomplish things that our predecessors thought were impossible.

we are more capable not because of genetic changes but because we benefit from a social infrastructure whose wisdom and capabilities far exceed ours 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 can’t solve on our own. the story of progress will continue, and our children will be able to do things that we can’t do ourselves.

it won’t happen overnight, but we’ll soon be able to work with ai to help us do more things that we can’t do on our own; eventually, each of us will have a personal ai team made up of virtual experts in different fields, working together to create almost anything we can imagine.

our children will have virtual tutors capable of providing personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at any pace they need. we can envision similar ideas applied to better healthcare, creating any software anyone can imagine, and more.

as these new capabilities are realized, we can have a kind of shared prosperity that seems unimaginable today; a future in which everyone can live better than anyone does today.

while prosperity alone will not 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 of looking at human history: after thousands of years of scientific discovery and technological progress, we have figured out how to melt sand, add some impurities, and then arrange it into computer chips with amazing precision on an extremely small scale, running energy through those chips to create increasingly capable ai systems.

this is probably 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 will get there.

how did we come to stand on the threshold of this leap forward in prosperity?

to sum it up in three words: deep learning works.

to sum it up 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; humanity has 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 we have, the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems. no matter how much time i spend thinking about this, i still can’t 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 will solve the remaining problems. we can say a lot about what might come next, but the main point is that ai will get better as it scales, which will improve the lives of people around the world.

ai models will soon act as autonomous personal assistants, performing specific tasks for us, such as 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 advancements in a variety of fields.

technology has taken 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 plentiful (which requires a lot of energy and chips). if we don’t build enough infrastructure, ai will become a very limited resource, potentially fueling wars, and primarily a tool for the wealthy.

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 will be able to truly express it through writing; a defining feature of the intelligent age will be great prosperity.

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

with nearly unlimited intelligence and abundant energy—the ability to come up with great ideas, and the ability to make those ideas come to fruition—we can do a lot.

as we’ve seen with other technologies, there will be downsides, 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 don’t worry that we’ll run out of things to do (even if those jobs don’t look like “real jobs” today).

humans have an innate desire to create and be useful to each other, and ai will enhance our capabilities like never before. as a society, we will 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 looks back and aspires 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 a hundred years to today, the prosperity around us would be equally unbelievable.

vc investment in ai startups has reached $64.1 billion so far this year, close to the peak in 2021, but the total annual revenue of ai worldwide is only tens of billions of dollars.