sam altman imagines the era of intelligence: deep learning works, and super intelligence may appear in a few thousand days
2024-09-24
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“the road to the intelligent age is paved with computing power, energy, and human will… we will return to an ever-expanding world.”
sam altman ic data map
on september 23rd local time, sam altman, ceo of artificial intelligence giant openai, said this in an article titled "the age of intelligence".
altman's judgment is reflected in the accompanying picture: a winding path stretches to the horizon, with colorful fields on both sides, a vibrant landscape. he believes that in the next few decades, people will be able to do things that seem like magic to their ancestors. "i believe that the future will be so bright that no one will be able to describe it now; a notable feature of the intelligent age will be large-scale prosperity. although this will happen gradually, shocking victories, repairing the climate, establishing space colonies and discovering all physics will eventually become commonplace. with nearly unlimited wisdom and abundant energy, the ability to generate great ideas and the ability to realize these ideas, we can do a lot of things."
altman believes that the reason why humans are more capable today is not because of genetic changes, but because they benefit from the infrastructure of society, which is much smarter and more capable than any one person; in an important sense, society itself is a kind of advanced intelligence. our ancestors and their predecessors created and achieved great things. they contributed to the "scaffolding" of human progress, and we all benefited from it. ai will provide people with tools to solve difficult problems and help us add new pillars to the "scaffolding" that we cannot solve on our own. and the story of human progress will continue, and our descendants will be able to do things we cannot do.
he admitted that this goal will not be achieved overnight, but people will soon be able to work with ai, and ai will be able to help accomplish more things; eventually, everyone will have a private ai team, which is made up of virtual experts in different fields, working together to create almost anything imaginable. children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized guidance in any subject in any language and at any speed. this includes access to better health care services, the ability to create any software people can imagine, and more.
“with these new capabilities, we can achieve a level of shared prosperity that seems unimaginable today; a future in which everyone will be better off than they are today. prosperity itself will not necessarily make people happy—there will be many miserable rich people—but it will improve the lives of people around the world.altman said.
he believes that from a narrow perspective of human history, after thousands of years of scientific discovery and technological progress, people have figured out how to melt sand, add some impurities, arrange it into computer chips with amazing precision and at a very small scale, run energy through it, and ultimately be able to create more and more powerful ai systems. "this is probably the most important fact in all of history so far. we could have superintelligence in a few thousand days, maybe longer, but i believe we will get there.”。
as for how to achieve the next leap in prosperity, altman said that "deep learning works," or to expand on it, "deep learning works, and as the scale expands, the effect gets better and better, and we are investing more and more resources in it."
he further stated: "humans have discovered an algorithm that can truly, truly learn any data distribution (or the underlying 'rules' that produce any data distribution) with astonishing accuracy.the more computing power and data available, the more it can help people solve tough problems. i find that no matter how much time i spend thinking about this, i can never really comprehend how important it is.”
of course, he said there are still many details to be worked out, but it would be a mistake to get hung up on any particular challenge. he stressed that "deep learning works, and we will solve the rest. there is a lot we can say about what might happen next, but the main point is that ai will get better as it scales, and this will bring meaningful improvements to the lives of people around the world."
therefore, altman also said that if you want as many people as possible to master ai, you must reduce the cost of computing power and make it abundant (this requires a lot of energy and chips). if you don’t build enough infrastructure, artificial intelligence will become a very limited resource, people will fight for it, and ai will mainly become a tool for the rich.
he believes that the advent of the intelligent era is a major development, facing very complex and extremely severe challenges. it will not be a completely positive story, "but the benefits are so great that we should think about ourselves and the future and figure out how to deal with the risks in front of us."
altman said that as seen in other technologies, artificial intelligence will also have drawbacks, and efforts need to be made from now on to maximize the advantages of artificial intelligence while minimizing its harms. he gave an example that ai will bring major changes to the labor market in the next few years (both good and bad), but most jobs will change more slowly than most people think, and he is not worried that people will be left with nothing to do (even if these jobs do not seem like "real jobs" today).humans have an innate desire to create and exploit each other, and ai will allow us to amplify our abilities like never before. as a society, we will return to an ever-expanding world where we can once again focus on playing positive-sum games.(note: a game where both parties can gain benefits)… many of the things we do today would have seemed like a waste of time to people hundreds of years ago, but no one would look back and wish they were 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 from today, the prosperity around us would also be unimaginable to us.”
thepaper.cn reporter qin sheng
(this article is from the paper. for more original information, please download the "the paper" app)
