Be wary of Sam Altman’s AI doublespeak

REMEMBER when OpenAI’s non-profit board unceremoniously fired Sam Altman? It was a four-day spell in the wilderness for the chief executive officer, sparked by the claim he had not been “consistently candid” with the directors. A year later, and Altman is not being very consistent about the future of artificial intelligence (AI).

In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek published on Monday (Jan 6), Altman admitted that he had 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 candour 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”.