Be Wary of Sam Altman’s AI Doublespeak
OpenAI’s CEO masterfully paints a mirage of safety and abundance in our future – and contradicts himself along the way.
Sam Altman.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Remember when OpenAI’s nonprofit board unceremoniously fired Sam Altman? It was a four-day spell in the wilderness for the chief executive officer, sparked by the claim he hadn’t been “consistently candid” with the directors. A year later and Altman isn’t being very consistent about the future of artificial intelligence. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek published on Monday, Altman admitted that he’d once conjured a “totally random” date for when OpenAI would build artificial general intelligence (AGI), a theoretical threshold when AI surpasses human intelligence. It would be 2025, a decade out from the company’s founding.
Altman’s candor about that mistake was momentarily refreshing until he breezily made another prediction in the same interview: “I think AGI will probably get developed during this president’s term,” he said. He made a bigger claim in a personal blog post on Monday that we would see AI “agents” join the workforce this year that “materially change the output of companies.”