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tencent technology news, september 24, according to foreign media reports, on monday local time in the united states, openai ceo sam altman outlined his vision for ai-driven technological progress and global prosperity in a personal blog post titled "the age of intelligence". the article paints a picture of ai accelerating human progress, and altman believes that super ai may emerge within the next decade.

“we may be within a few thousand days of achieving superintelligence,” altman wrote. “although it may take longer, i believe we will eventually get there.”

openai's current goal is to create agi (artificial general intelligence), an ai system that can perform many tasks without specific training and whose intelligence level can match that of humans.aigoing beyond artificial intelligence, it can be viewed as a hypothetical level of machine intelligence that can greatly outperform humans at any intellectual task, perhaps to an incredible degree.

altman describes the era we are in now as the dawn of the "intelligent age," the next revolutionary technological era in human history after the stone age, the agricultural age, and the industrial age. he believes that the success of deep learning algorithms is the catalyst for this new era.

thisOpenAIthe ceo envisions ai assistants becoming increasingly powerful, eventually forming "personal ai teams" that can help individuals accomplish nearly anything they can think of. he predicts ai will enable breakthroughs in education, healthcare, software development and other fields.

the following is the full text of altman’s blog post:

in the coming decades, we will be able to do things that our grandparents would have considered magic.

this phenomenon is not new, but it is accelerating. human capabilities have increased dramatically over time, and we are now able to do many things that our ancestors thought were impossible.

our increased capabilities will not come from genetic changes, but from the support of a social infrastructure that will be smarter and more capable than any of us. in a sense, society itself is a kind of advanced intelligence. our grandparents and earlier generations achieved great things and built the infrastructure for human progress, and we all benefit from it. artificial intelligence will give people the tools to solve complex problems and help us add new pillars to these infrastructures. the story of progress will continue, and our children will be able to do things that we cannot do.

of course, none of this will happen overnight, but we will soon be able to collaborate with ai to accomplish more tasks than ever before. eventually, everyone could have their own 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 in any way desired. we can also envision similar scenarios for improving healthcare, developing software that anyone can imagine, and more.

with these new capabilities, we could achieve levels of shared prosperity that are unimaginable today. in the future, everyone could be better off than anyone is today. while prosperity itself will not necessarily bring happiness—many wealthy people in the world are still miserable—it will significantly improve the quality of life for people around the world.

look at human history in a narrow sense: over thousands of years of scientific discovery and technological advances, we have learned how to melt sand, add impurities, and arrange it with amazing precision down to the tiniest scale to make computer chips, run energy through it, and ultimately create increasingly powerful artificial intelligence systems.

this may be the most important invention in history so far. we may be within a few thousand days of superintelligence. it may take longer, but i believe we will eventually get there.

so how do we achieve the next leap in prosperity?

it can be summed up in six words: deep learning success.

to paraphrase in one sentence: deep learning is successful, it is predictable that it will get better as it scales, and we are investing more and more resources in it.

it’s that simple; humanity has discovered an algorithm that can truly learn any data distribution (or the underlying “rules” that generate any data distribution) to an astonishing degree of accuracy, and the more compute and data available, the more effective this algorithm becomes at helping people solve complex problems. i find that no matter how much time i spend thinking about this, i can never really grasp its significance.

while we still have many details to figure out, it would be a mistake to get distracted by specific challenges. deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems. we have many ideas about what might happen in the future, but the main one is that ai will get better as it scales, which will bring meaningful improvements to the lives of people around the world.

ai models will soon become autonomous personal assistants, completing specific tasks on our behalf, such as coordinating healthcare. at some point in the future, as technology advances, ai systems will become even better, helping us create better next-generation systems and driving scientific advancements in a variety of fields.

technology helped us move from the stone age to the agricultural age and then to the industrial age. from here, the path to the intelligent age requires computing power, energy, and human will.

in order to put ai in the hands of as many people as possible, we need to reduce the cost of computing and make it easier to use (which requires a lot of energy and chips). if we don’t build enough infrastructure, ai will become a limited resource, may even lead to wars, and become a tool exclusively for the rich.

we need to act wisely and resolutely. the advent of the intelligent age is an important milestone, but it comes with complex and high-stakes challenges. it’s not an all-positive story, but its potentially huge benefits make it our responsibility to find ways to address the risks.

i believe the future will be brighter, but no one can accurately describe it in words now, but a key feature of the intelligent era will be great prosperity.

although this process will be gradual, astounding achievements will eventually become commonplace, such as solving the climate problem, establishing space colonies, and discovering all the laws of physics. with nearly unlimited intelligence and abundant energy—the ability to create great ideas, and the ability to realize those ideas—we will be able to create many great ideas and turn them into reality.

as other technologies have shown, ai will have downsides, and we need to start working now to maximize its benefits while minimizing its harms. for example, we expect this technology to have significant impacts on the labor market in the coming years (for better or worse), but most jobs are likely to change more slowly than people think, and i wouldn’t worry about people losing their jobs to it, even if they don’t look like today’s “real jobs.”

people have an innate desire to create and help others, and ai will allow us to augment our abilities in ways never before possible. as a society, we will return to an ever-expanding world, once again focusing on the common good.

many of the jobs we do today may have seemed trivial and a waste of time to people hundreds of years ago, but no one wants to be a lamplighter. if a lamplighter could see the world today, he would find the prosperity around him incredible. if we can reach 100 years from now, the prosperity around us will also be incredible to us. (compiled by jinlu)