TECH NEWS – Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, has blogged about his observations on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and how AGI could impact the human race.

Let’s start with three observations. The first is that the intelligence of an AI model is roughly equal to the logarithm of the resources used to train and run it. These resources are mainly training computation, data, and inference computation. It appears that you can spend arbitrary amounts of money and get continuous and predictable gains; the scaling laws that predict this are accurate over many orders of magnitude. The second is that the cost of using a given level of AI drops by about 1/10th every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more usage. You can see this in the cost of tokens from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped by about 150 times in that time. Moore’s Law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is incredibly powerful. Third, the socio-economic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. As a consequence, OpenAI sees no reason to stop exponentially increasing investment in the near future.

After that, Altman effectively painted a utopia that could happen by 2035: “The economic growth before us looks amazing, and we can now imagine a world where we cure all diseases, have much more time to enjoy our families, and can fully realize our creative potential. In a decade, perhaps everyone on Earth will be able to accomplish more than the most influential person can today. Let’s take the case of a software engineer… imagine him as a real, but relatively junior, virtual colleague. Now imagine 1,000 of them. Or 1 million of them. Now imagine such agents in every field of knowledge work. We will still fall in love, start families, argue online, hike in nature, etc. But the future will come at us in ways that are impossible to ignore, and the long-term changes to our society and economy will be enormous.

Agency, willpower, and determination are likely to be extremely valuable. Deciding what to do and figuring out how to navigate an ever-changing world will be of great value; resilience and adaptability will be helpful skills to cultivate. AGI will be the greatest lever ever placed on human volition, enabling individuals to have more impact than ever before, not less. There is a lot of talent out there right now without the resources to fully express itself, and if we change that, the resulting creative output of the world will lead to tremendous benefits for all of us,” Altman said.

Let’s go back to Moore’s Law, which is slowly becoming a useless concept for graphics cards and processors (as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argues). Moore’s Law is defined as the principle that the speed and power of computers will double every two years between hardware generations due to the increase in the number of transistors, at minimal cost. However, the development of artificial intelligence has progressed at a relentless pace in recent years, with OpenAI leading the way with various versions of the ChatGPT AI chatbot.

Altman says AGI is the next step and is already moving at a fast pace. If his observations are correct, then the gigantic price drop over time relative to the use of AI could be a good metric to measure the progress of AI in a similar way. Then it might be Altman’s Law. Moore’s Law is named after Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, who observed in 1965 that the number of components in integrated circuits doubled every year, and then modified his theory in 1975 to a doubling every two years. This became a guiding principle in the chip/semiconductor industry to ensure future-proof, long-term design.

The question is how much of Altman’s vision will be realized.

Source: PCGamer, Sam Altman