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.
The singularity has been an obsession of science fiction writers for close to 100 years. In those writings, it has rarely ended well. Perhaps most famously, James Cameron's "The Terminator" is a story about the repercussions of an AI, called "Skynet," that self-improves and becomes self-aware before deciding its creators are its biggest threat.
Later in the podcast, Altman criticizes AI leaders who have repeatedly warned that AI is dangerous. He didn't name Anthropic, his primary competition, but its CEO, Dario Amodei, is well-known for making dire predictions about the future in his calls for greater attention to safety.
"I also think some of the alternative visions painted by other companies are quite terrifying," Altman said. "I'm going to make sure that gets pushed against and is not what happens."
OpenAI, incidentally, has said it is preparing to IPO later this year.
Altman isn't the only tech executive who believes this eyebrow-raising milestone is nigh. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said in May that humanity was standing at the "foothills of the singularity," and predicted that AI could be 100 times as transformative as the Industrial Revolution.
There's also a camp of skeptics, of course. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently dismissed discussions about the singularity and conscious AI as speculative and "made up."