Founder mode? Pffft. Who needs that when you can be the father of creation, ushering in a new age of humanity?
Welcome to “god mode.”
Sam Altman, the CEO of the AI startup headed for a $150B valuation, OpenAI, has historically pitched AI as the solution to the world’s problems, despite its significant impact on energy resources, carbon emissions, and water usage to cool data centers, coming at the cost of the progress the world has made toward combating climate change.
In Altman’s latest post, the OpenAI leader presents an incredibly positive update on the state of AI, hyping its world-changing potential. Far from being an occasionally helpful alternative to a Google search or a homework helper, Altman presents AI’s future as one that will change humanity’s progress — for the better, naturally.
Through rose-tinted contacts, Altman pitches the numerous ways he believes AI will save the world. But much of what he writes is seemingly meant to convince the skeptics of how much AI matters and could well have the opposite result: instead of creating new fans, posts like this may well invite increased scrutiny as to whether or not we’re in an “emperor’s new clothes” situation.
As one commentator with the username sharkjacobs on the technical forum Hacker News writes, “I’m not an AI skeptic at all, I use LLMs all the time, and find them very useful. But stuff like this makes me very skeptical of the people who are making and selling AI.”
Let’s go through Altman’s promises and rate them as believable or just hype:
- AI will help us solve “hard problems.” Believable. It’s a vague enough statement and also one that’s difficult to refute. Whether those hard problems will be ultimately in something profound, like medical science, or something beyond helping engineers with coding challenges, or helping kids cheat on their homework, or the creation of weird and maybe partially stolen art, still remains to be seen. Some problems are hard, but not what you might call important.
- “We’ll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI.” Again, vague hype. Yes, using a new tool or technology will help us accomplish “more” but will it actually increase efficiency to the point that businesses are willing to shell out for it, especially considering the state it’s in today? It’s still too early to know the answer here.
- “..Eventually we can each have a personal AI team, full of virtual experts in different areas, working together to create almost anything we can imagine.” Hype. First of all, creating “almost anything” we can imagine is not necessarily a good thing — and not only because it detracts from the art and works created by actual humans — but because people can imagine some genuinely terrible things. It’s also worth asking whether these “virtual experts” would just be swiping and summarizing the ideas of actual experts.
- “Our children will have virtual tutors…” Believable. A chatbot helper probably isn’t better than a 1:1 tutoring session with an actual person, but the fact is many families can’t afford the real thing. But such an important and influential role will need to be carefully defined and rigorously studied.
- “…imagine similar ideas for better healthcare…” Hype. Again, a vague promise that AI will improve our health and well-being, as it will have “the ability to create any kind of software someone can imagine.”
- “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.” Hype! This is where he really goes into god mode.
- AI will “ meaningfully improve the lives of people around the world.” Hype. How? When? To what extent? Whose lives? We have many questions here.
- “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 (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there.” Hype with a capital H — A vague tease that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is, with all certainty, going to arrive, and it’s only a matter of time. However, many AI critics argue AGI may not be realized, at least as promised. We may end up with smarter models, but not necessarily those that are capable of the same levels of human understanding, skeptics believe.
- “…the next leap in prosperity” Hype. Like many technological changes, AI in the near term may lead to job losses, before creating new ones. And, if it were to free up people from the drudgery of work, then how would they pay their rent or buy food in a capitalist society that demands labor as the cost of living for all but the mega-rich? A lot of this rhetoric will be familiar to anyone who has followed the “singularity” type futurists over the years.
- “AI is going to get better with scale…” Believable. It does make sense that AI will improve as the technology scales and grows. Though the cost of that scale is not put in the balance.
- “…and that will lead to meaningful improvements to the lives of people around the world.” Hold up! Hype. We’re going to need to see the receipts on this one when the time comes. Also, how is “meaningful” being measured here? Because the consumer experience with things like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other chatbots today often involves AI hallucinating facts, pulling bad info from scraped websites, or regurgitating the dumbest stuff posted on Reddit, none of which are “meaningful improvements,” as of yet. (Of course, we’re not talking just about chatbots in this post, but it’s a point that could be lost on the intended audience!)
- “AI systems are going to get so good that they help us make better next-generation systems and make scientific progress across the board.” Hype. AI could improve things in areas like medicine and science, and in fact already is, but whether these improvements are incremental or significant is something we can’t yet measure. Until AI’s cancer treatments and radiology expertise is provably leading to significantly improved outcomes for regular people, this has to be categorized as hype.
- “…The path to the Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy, and human will.” Hype. Someone make this into a bumper sticker!
- “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.” Hype. If we don’t embrace and invest in AI, wars are inevitable? Okay? That’s why we’re spinning up more power plants like the one at Three Mile Island! YOLO!
- “The dawn of the Intelligence Age.” Hype. Historians get to define the past ages; for all we know, this could be the “age of resource overconsumption” that eventually led to our downfall.
- “It will not be an entirely positive story, but the upside is so tremendous…” First part, believable. Second part, hype.
- “…the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now.” Then why is Altman trying? We rate the futility as believable, but the brightness as hype.
- “a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be massive prosperity.” Hype. Show us the money. Heck, convince the CIOs of AI’s value, first.
- “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.” Hype. So, we have to destroy the environment to run AI datacenters but AI will eventually fix climate change? Insert mind-blowing emoji here! The “discovery of all of physics?” AI will build space colonies? We suppose if you read this far into his post, you’d probably buy anything he sells at this point!
- “…we expect that this technology can cause a significant change in labor markets…” Believable. But don’t sugarcoat this one, this coming change could be bad in the immediate future.
- “Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter.” Hype. Why shade lamplighters? That actually sounds like a pretty chill job? Jokes aside, this falsely equates the arrival of AI as being as impactful as the arrival of electricity, which is more than a little presumptuous.
Altman’s hype aside, it’s worth acknowledging that AI is a sizable platform shift and perhaps the biggest since the arrival of mobile technology. (Case in point: Apple is selling its iPhone 16 based on its AI capabilities, not its hardware.)
AI could eventually deliver major changes in time. But today, it’s still fair to question if the arrival of AI will ultimately prove as significant as connecting the world through the internet, putting a web-connected computer in everyone’s home, and then in everyone’s pocket.
On the one side are the true believers counting the days to AGI; and on the other, skeptics who would like to see more before dubbing the AI age a utopia — especially considering the real-world costs to the environment, the workforce, art and creation.
We’re currently at the point in AI’s development where consumers and businesses alike are figuring out how AI will fit into their usual workflows, where AI can improve efficiencies, and where it will not. Until then, much of what’s being written about AI’s future can only be speculative.