Prosperity and Promise in "The Intelligence Age”

0:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, OpenAI's Sam Altman says that superintelligence could be just thousands of days away. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. So join the conversation, follow the Discord link in our show notes.

0:23Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Quick administrative note, I am traveling this week. And while there will be shows every day as normal, some of them might be a slightly different format. For example, today, we are going to do a long read, but in the middle of the week, because OpenAI's Sam Altman dropped a post that everyone is talking about. Also, as I'm recording, there are rumors swirling of a new anthropic model coming, so it seems like there's going to be a lot to talk about. But for now, we are going to read The Intelligence Age. Sam Altman published his new essay, The Intelligence Age, on his personal blog yesterday on September 23rd, 2024.

0:58It has generated a huge amount of conversation, so first, let's read the piece, and then we will see how people are discussing it. Altman writes, In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents. This phenomenon is not new, but it will be newly accelerated. People have become dramatically more capable over time. We can already accomplish things now that our predecessors would have believed to be impossible. We are more capable not because of genetic change, but because we benefit from the infrastructure of society being way smarter and more capable than any one of us.

1:27In any important sense, society itself is a form of advanced intelligence. Our grandparents and the generations that came before them built and achieved great things. They contributed to the scaffolding of human progress that we all benefit from. AI will give people tools to solve hard problems and help us add new struts to that scaffolding that we couldn't have figured out on our own. The story of progress will continue and our children will be able to do things we can't. It won't happen all at once, but we'll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI.

1:55Eventually, we can each have a personal AI team full of virtual experts in different areas working together to create almost anything we can imagine. Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need. We can imagine similar ideas for better healthcare, the ability to create any kind of software someone can imagine, and much more. With these new abilities, we can have shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today. In the future, everyone's lives can be better than anyone's life is now. Prosperity alone doesn't necessarily make people happy.

2:25There are plenty of miserable rich people. But it would meaningfully improve the lives of people around the world. Here is one narrow way to look at human history. After thousands of years of compounding scientific discovery and technological progress, we have figured out how to melt sand, add some impurities, arrange it with astonishing precision, add extraordinarily tiny scale into computer chips, run energy through it, and end up with systems capable of creating increasingly capable artificial intelligence. This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days.

2:55It may take longer, but I'm confident we'll get there. How did we get to the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity? In three words, deep learning worked. In 15 words, deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we dedicated increasing resources to it. That's really it. Humanity discovered an algorithm that could really truly learn any distribution of data, or really the underlying rules that produce any distribution of data. To a shocking degree of precision, the more compute and data available, the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems. I find that no matter how much time I spend thinking about this, I can never really internalize how consequential it is.

3:27There are a lot of details we still have to figure out, but it's a mistake to get distracted by any particular challenge. Deep learning works and we will solve the remaining problems. We can say a lot of things about what may happen next, but the main one is that AI is going to get better with scale, and that will lead to meaningful improvements to the lives of people around the world. AI models will soon serve as autonomous personal assistants who carry out specific tasks on our behalf, like coordinating medical care on your behalf. At some point further down the road, AI systems are going to get so good that they help us make better next generation systems and make scientific progress across the board.

3:58Technology brought us from the stone age to the agricultural age and then to the industrial age. From here, the path to the intelligence age is paved with compute, energy, and human will. If we want to put AI into the hands of as many as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant, which requires lots of energy and chips. If we don't build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people. We need to act wisely but with conviction. The dawn of the intelligence age is a momentous development with very complex and extremely high-stakes challenges.

4:28It will not be an entirely positive story, but the upside is so tremendous that we owe it to ourselves and the future to figure out how to navigate the risks in front of us. Today's episode is brought to you by Venice. The leading AI companies store your entire conversation history and attach it to your identity forever. That's every question you ask, every answer you receive, every image you generate, Every thought you share with the machine, it's all being spied on. If you trust all the company's hackers and NSA board members that will ever have access to your AI conversations, then rejoice, for you are well served.

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6:24Go to besuper.ai and check it out today. I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now. A defining characteristic of the intelligence age will be massive prosperity. Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs. Fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics will eventually become commonplace. With nearly limitless intelligence and abundant energy, the ability to generate great ideas and the ability to make them happen, we can do quite a lot. As we have seen with other technologies, there will also be downsides, and we need to start working now to maximize AI's benefits while minimizing its harms.

7:00As one example, we expect that this technology can cause a significant change in labor markets, good and bad in the coming years, but most jobs will change more slowly than most people think, and I have no fear that we'll run out of things to do, even if they don't look like quote-unquote real jobs to us today. People have an innate desire to create and to be useful to each other, and AI will allow us to amplify our own abilities like never before. As a society, we will be back in an expanding world, and we can again focus on playing positive-sum games. Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling waste of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past wishing they were a lamplighter.

7:32If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast forward 100 years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable. All right, so this is quite the piece from Altman. So what were people's responses? First of all, there was a fair bit of cynicism. Paul Sweeney writes, there's absolutely no possible way this prediction is related to fundraising. And of course, he's talking about the part of the essay which you probably caught in which was the single most quoted and referenced piece of this, which is the prediction of superintelligence in a few thousand days.

8:07Some people got stuck on the weirdness of that particular way of framing time. But again, there were others like Paul here who read this whole thing through cynical eyes as a way to juice OpenAI's valuation as they try to close this round at$150 billion valuation. IMU will not be surprised to find a little less cynical than that, but there were certainly enough of those people that it's worth giving voice to their perspective. Others were a little flabbergasted by some of the examples. Ian Kreitzberg writes, Okay, but like WTF does this even mean? AI will lead to the discovery of all physics? Sam has switched from X-risk hype to utopia hype, but hype is still hype.

8:39Indeed, that switch was something that many others noticed as well. Arthur Braitman wrote, Interestingly, there is no discussion of safety, existential risk, or alignment. There's a small nod to jobs, perhaps the least of the concerns, and that's about it. This is a pretty astounding pivot from the discourse in 2023 or the Senate hearing. The serious adult responded, I like this direction in principle, but really don't like to see people memory hole their mistakes.

9:13Of course, what Arthur is referring to is the fact that many of the leading existential risk advocates inside of OpenAI, the people who are working on, for example, the super alignment team, have left the company, either to join Anthropic in the case of people like Jan Leakey, or to start their own companies in the case of Iliad Sutzgever, who of course just announced a billion-dollar raise for his safe superintelligence company. So the question that Arthur poses is which of Sam's perspectives were real? The one that was very considerate and conscientious of X-Risk that was on display at the Senate hearing last year?

9:42Or this one, which doesn't seem to think that that's a big issue, or at least doesn't think it warrants a mention in this piece? Professor Ethan Mollick writes, Fascinating, maybe premature victory lap from Sam Altman in OpenAI. This is quite the declaration. Take this stuff with a sort of grain of salt, but also as useful signal about attitudes of AI insiders actually building new models. So what he's referring to specifically here that I think is important is this question of whether we're reaching the limits of our ability to scale models with current techniques. Many people think we are, but the labs just keep seeming to insist that we are not anywhere close.

10:12And I think Ethan's point is that even if you think Sam is wrong, or that the whole thing should be taken with a grain of salt, it does seem to suggest that the people inside the labs really do think that we have not reached the limits of current techniques yet. On the other end of the spectrum, there were some who were bummed, or at least play-acted that on Twitter. Bindu Reddy writes, bad news. Super intelligence is thousands of days away. AGI has not been achieved yet. No, you don't get to retire yet. No, you can't make a billion overnight by applying AGI either. You have to wait thousands of days.

10:39Could be a decade. Obviously, a little bit tongue-in-cheek. So I think the interesting thing about this is that it seems to me pretty clearly to be a conversational redefinition, to shift the focus of the AI narrative to a discussion of prosperity and possibility, rather than to leave it mired in the questions of risk and catastrophe, which have been a big part of the shape. To what extent this is a response to things like SB 1047 with its focus on X-Risk seem like interesting questions to ask. It does feel to me, and this is not an accusation of it being insincere, but it does feel to me to be political, in the sense that it starts to articulate the problems that are worth caring about as one that's clear and present for many lawmakers, which is jobs.

11:18Now, of course, the idea that old jobs bad, future jobs good is well-trodden territory in technology, but the fact that this is where the essay concludes, that we are all lamplighters who just don't know how much better the future could be, seems to me to be a pretty clear statement of where SAM and perhaps OpenAI want to shift the conversation. At the end of the day, this does feel like a consequential piece to me. It feels like even more than before, we are gearing up for a narrative battle between AI as a thing of danger and AI as an enabler of prosperity and abundance. And to some extent, it feels like Altman was trying to write a foundational document for the prosperity side of that argument.

11:53Now, like I said, as I record this, there are rumors swirling of new models, new funding. It feels like we are headed into another big acceleration period in AI. So get excited, stay tuned, and until next time, peace.

12:11Quick note of apology on the sound quality. This got recorded accidentally on the main laptop microphone rather than the good podcast microphone. We're going to do our best to restore the sound, but if it feels a little off, that's why. Again, apologies for the slight dip in quality.