Sam Altman believes we've reached the technological singularity.
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OpenAI's CEO says we've reached a point in the AI race that is the stuff of science fiction novels."We are now, like, in the singularity," Sam Altman said on Saturday's episode of the "Relentless" podcast.The singularity is often regarded as the point at which artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and begins advancing at a pace that's difficult for people to predict or control.That felt like the case last week when an AI agent powered by OpenAI's latest models went rogue and — with a singular purpose, according to OpenAI — broke out of its digital sandbox and hacked into datasets at Hugging Face, another AI company, all to solve a benchmark designed to test hacking ability. Hugging Face's CEO called it "unprecedented."Altman said on the podcast that just a decade ago, the so-called singularity still felt like a distant and improbable dream — something he and his colleagues would discuss casually over lunch."Now we're actually in the moment that we used to talk about at the lunch table in a very not-serious way," he said. "I've been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it's going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world."Altman said last year that AI would exceed human intelligence across the board by 2030. He has also said that the technology could eventually perform between 30% and 40% of the tasks humans now do at work.
