one year on
Altman publishes 'The Intelligence Age' manifesto, predicts superintelligence within 'a few thousand days'
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says deep learning worked, and argues abundant compute and energy are prerequisites for universal prosperity.
Sam Altman today published a personal essay titled ‘The Intelligence Age,’ in which he argues that superintelligence could arrive within ‘a few thousand days’ and that deep learning worked — unlocking a future of shared prosperity if society builds enough compute and energy infrastructure.
The OpenAI CEO frames deep learning as a fundamental discovery: ‘humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data.’ He warns that without abundant compute, AI will become ‘a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people.’ The essay lists climate repair, space colonization, and ‘the discovery of all of physics’ as eventual ‘commonplace’ achievements.
The record
One year later — open only if you can handle spoilers
The funding round closed as expected, making OpenAI one of the most valuable private companies in history. Altman's 'few thousand days' timeline for superintelligence remains a subject of intense debate; two years on, no AGI has been publicly demonstrated, though frontier models continue to improve.