We already knew where OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, stands on artificial intelligence vis-à-vis the human saga: It will be transformative, historic and overwhelmingly beneficial. He has been nothing but consistent across countless interviews. For some reason, this week he felt it necessary to distill those opinions in a succinct blog post. “The Intelligence Age,” as he calls it, will be a time of abundance. “We can have shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today; in the future, everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now,” he writes. “Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs—fixing the climate, establishing a space colony and the discovery of all of physics—will eventually become commonplace.”
Maybe he published this to dispute a train of thought that dismisses the apparent gains of large language models as something of an illusion. Nuh-uh, he says. We’re getting this big AI bonus because “deep learning works,” as he said in an interview later in the week, mocking those who said that programs like OpenAI’s GPT4o were simply stupid engines delivering the next token in a queue. "Once it can start to prove unproven mathematical theorems, do we really still want to debate: 'Oh, but it's just predicting the next token?'" he said.
No matter what you think of Sam Altman, it’s indisputable that this is his truth: Artificial general intelligence–AI that matches and then exceeds human capabilities–is going to obliterate the problems plaguing humanity and usher in a golden age. I suggest we dub this deus ex machina concept The Strawberry Shortcut, in honor of the codename for OpenAI’s recent breakthrough in artificial reasoning. Like the shortcake, the premise looks appetizing but is less substantial in the eating.
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