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In his 2005 book "The Singularity is Near," the futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that the Singularity -- the moment in which machine intelligence surpasses our own -- would occur around the year 2045. Sam Altman believes it's much closer.
In a blog post published Tuesday, the OpenAI CEO delivered a homily devoted to what he views as the imminent arrival of artificial "superintelligence." Whereas artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is usually defined as a computer system able to match or outperform humans on any cognitive task, a superintelligent AI would go much further, overshadowing our own intelligence to such a vast degree that we'd be helpless to fathom it, like snails trying to understand general relativity.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
Crucially, the blog post frames this supposedly inevitable arrival of superintelligent AI as one that will happen gradually enough for society to prepare itself. By comparison, he looks back at the past five years, a relatively short period of time in which most people have gone from knowing nothing about AI to using powerful tools like ChatGPT on a daily basis, to the point where generative AI has become almost mundane.
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"Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it's much less weird than it seems like it should be," Altman wrote.
His writing veers at times into quasi-religious territory, portraying the arrival of superintelligent AI in terms reminiscent of early Christian prophets describing the Second Coming. While his language is cloaked in scientific, secular language, it's hard not to detect just a hint of proselytizing: "the 2030s are likely going to be wildly different from any time that has come before," he writes. "We do not know how far beyond human-level intelligence we can go, but we are about to find out."
AGI -- and by extension, artificial superintelligence -- has been a divisive subject in the tech world. Like Altman, many believe its arrival is not a matter of if, but when. Meta is reportedly preparing to launch an internal research lab devoted to building superintelligence. Others doubt that it's even technically possible to build a machine that's more advanced than the human brain.
OpenAI catapulted to global fame following its release of ChatGPT in late 2022. The company, since then, has been shipping new AI products at a breakneck pace, prompting a steady trickle of employees to depart, citing concerns that safety was being deprioritized in the name of speed. Many have joined Anthropic, an AI company that was actually founded by former OpenAI employees, or have gone on to launch their own ventures. Ilya Sutskever, for example -- a cofounder of OpenAI and its former chief scientist -- founded a company called Safe Superintelligence (SSI) last June.
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