Some of you may be unemployed in the future but it’s a sacrifice that AI is willing to make.
There’s nothing innately newsworthy about a technology boss promoting the benefits of their products but when the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT reckons that deep learning will lead humanity into a new Age, solve climate change, and discover all of physics then it’s certainly worth raising an eyebrow, at least.
I am, of course, talking about Sam Altman of OpenAI, who is perhaps the most vocal proponent of artificial intelligence at the moment. His latest musings (via The Verge), though, do read more like a piece of science fiction than a detailed breakdown of what the future holds for deep learning.
One expects a CEO to be ebullient about their product and make lofty but ambiguous claims, but Altman is taking things another step beyond all of that. “I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now”, says Altman, before going on to do just that.
His first claim is that AI will ultimately usher us all into a new era of human history—just as the Industrial Age gave way to the Information Age, Alman reckons it’ll be the Intelligence Age soon enough, all thanks to deep learning.
“Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy, and human will”, he writes, though I believe he may have forgotten to add the phrase ‘obscene amount of cash’ somewhere in those final parts.
