Reading a blog post from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on this particular Monday in February makes perfect sense, considering what’s happening in the world right now. The AI Action Summit in Paris has world leaders and tech execs in attendance, discussing AI’s future and potential regulation needed to safeguard the space.
Sam Altman penned a blog post titled Three Observations, sharing a mission statement for the future of ChatGPT and other OpenAI technology, with a clear focus on AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). The CEO gives us his incredibly optimistic view of what AGI and AI agents will mean for the world in the near and more distant future and what life might be like once AGI and AI agents steal your jobs.
Altman’s View of the Post-AGI World
Altman started the blog by explaining AGI after making it clear that OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that AGI benefits humanity. As you’re about to see, the exec didn’t offer a perfectly objective explanation for AGI or what AGI means from the Microsoft-OpenAI business relationship:
Systems that start to point to AGI are coming into view, and so we think it’s important to understand the moment we are in. AGI is a weakly defined term, but generally speaking we mean it to be a system that can tackle increasingly complex problems, at human level, in many fields.
Altman then explained the rapid progress in AI development, indicating that the cost of an AI product tends to fall by ten times every 12 months, leading to increased usage. GPT-4 prices from early 2023 dropped by about 150 times by the time ChatGPT reached the GPT-4o model in mid-2024.
ChatGPT Deep Research is a new AI agent that can research the web for information.
Altman also made it clear that OpenAI won’t stop investing in AI hardware in the near future, which is likely a needed remark in a post-DeepSeek world. A few weeks ago, the Chinese AI stunned the world with its ChatGPT-like abilities obtained at much lower costs.
All these AI developments will lead to the next phase of AI evolution, including AI agents, towards the age of AGI. That’s where Altman gave an example of an AI agent working as a software engineer:
Let’s imagine the case of a software engineering agent, which is an agent that we expect to be particularly important. Imagine that this agent will eventually be capable of doing most things a software engineer at a top company with a few years of experience could do...
Altman didn’t say this engineer would take the job of a human, but he might have just as well said it. Imagine millions of AI agents taking over jobs in countless fields:
Still, imagine it as a real-but-relatively-junior virtual coworker. Now imagine 1,000 of them. Or 1 million of them. Now imagine such agents in every field of knowledge work.
Yes, that’s a nightmare scenario to some people, and it’s easy to understand why, even though Altman paints an overall rosy picture of what’s coming ahead and downplaying the bad side effects.
Altman said the world won’t change immediately this year, but AI and AGI will change in the more distant future. We’ll inevitably have to learn new ways of making ourselves useful (read: work) once AI takes over:
The world will not change all at once; it never does. Life will go on mostly the same in the short run, and people in 2025 will mostly spend their time in the same way they did in 2024...
Altman also mentioned that the impact of AGI will be uneven, which is probably a massive understatement. He also explained how day-to-day life might change people:
The price of many goods will eventually fall dramatically...
He said the road for OpenAI “looks fairly clear,” but it depends on public policy and collective opinion. Altman also mentioned there “will likely be some major decisions and limitations related to AGI safety that will be unpopular..."
OpenAI’s ChatGPT Operator AI agent.
In closing, Altman said that anyone in 2025 “should be able to marshal the intellectual capacity equivalent to everyone in 2025; everyone should have access to unlimited genius to direct however they can imagine.”
Hopefully, the road to AGI and the massive AI-related economic transformations that will impact society in the coming years will be easy to handle. But there’s no denying that the future Altman describes will move a lot of jobs to AI.
ChatGPT recognizes itself in Sam Altman’s blog.
ChatGPT gave me the good and the bad of AGI and AI agents taking over the world. He identified the potential strengths of better AI versions of itself, as outlined by Altman, and the impact smarter, cheaper, and widely accessible AI can have on humanity. ChatGPT also mentioned the concerning issues with Altman’s carefully worded AI vision. The potential is amazing, but the path needs careful guidance.
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