OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently penned a blog post titled ‘The Gentle Singularity’ and revealed how much energy ChatGPT uses for each query. Altman wrote that, on average, a ChatGPT query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, closer to what “an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes.”
Altman further noted that a ChatGPT query also uses “about 0.000085 gallons of water; roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon.” Altman went on to say that “the cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity.“
But besides ChatGPT’s energy consumption, what caught my attention was Altman’s opening paragraph. He declares in a rather dramatic way that we are accelerating towards superintelligence.
We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be.
It appears Altman is apprising the public that we have crossed the threshold and are moving towards transformative AI. The next paragraph gets even more interesting where he writes, “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.“
This suggests that current AI technologies are sufficient to take us to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and eventually, ASI (Artificial Superintelligence). This proposition is in direct conflict with prominent AI skeptics, including Meta AI’s chief scientist, Yann LeCun, who say LLMs have hit a wall and are not capable of leading us to AGI or ASI.
Altman further lays out a timeline of what’s coming:
- 2025: Arrival of agents that can do real cognitive work like coding agents
- 2026: Arrival of AI systems that can discover novel insights
- 2027: Arrival of robots that can perform real-world tasks
- 2030: Multi-fold productivity increase for individuals
- 2035: Brain-computer interfaces, and possibly space colonization
The Future of AI
Altman touched on “recursive self-improvement,” an AI system that can autonomously improve itself. He writes that current AI systems are not completely autonomous, but “this is a larval version of recursive self-improvement.” Current AI systems are beginning to improve the process of building better systems, which suggests that future AI may help build more advanced AI.
OpenAI is already hearing from scientists that they have become two or three times more productive with the help of current AI systems. Having said that, Altman acknowledges that job displacement will lead to serious societal disruption.
He writes, “There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before.“
In this regard, OpenAI’s former chief scientist and SSI chief, Ilya Sutskever, said the following at the University of Toronto:
“Slowly but surely, or maybe not so slowly, AI will keep getting better. And the day will come when AI will do all of our… all the things that we can do, not just some of them, but all of them. Anything which I can learn, anything which any one of you can learn, the AI could do as well.
How do we know this, by the way? How can I be so sure? How can I be so sure of that? The reason is that all of us have a brain, and the brain is a biological computer. That’s why we have a brain. The brain is a biological computer. So, why can’t the digital computer, a digital brain, do the same things? This is the one sentence summary for why AI will be able to do all those things: because we have a brain and the brain is a biological computer.
And so you can start asking yourselves, what’s going to happen? What’s going to happen when computers can do all of our jobs? Right? Those are really big questions.“
From AI researchers to industry leaders, many are claiming that AI is a transformative technology and will lead to a world of abundance. However, before that future arrives, the world will likely see societal disruptions. How much of this bold vision will become reality is something remains to be seen.
