Sam Altman Gentle Singularity

Sam Altman declares that AI is past the event horizon and the takeoff has started. We have recently built AI systems that are smarter than people in many ways, and are able to significantly amplify the output (productivity) of people using them. The least-likely part of the work is behind us; the scientific insights that got us to systems like GPT-4 and o3 were hard-won, but will take us very far.

Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be.

Robots are not yet walking the streets, nor are most of us talking to AI all day. People still die of disease, we still can’t easily go to space, and there is a lot about the universe we don’t understand.

2025 has seen the arrival of agents that can do real cognitive work; writing computer code will never be the same.

2026 will likely see the arrival of systems that can figure out novel insights.