Sep 24, 2024 - Technology

Sam's Law: Altman heralds "The Intelligence Age"

Mike Allen

Axios' Ina Fried interviews Sam Altman and UN Tech Envoy Amandeep Singh Gill in Manhattan on Monday. Photo: OpenAI

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman unveiled an optimistic manifesto on the future of AI, "The Intelligence Age," arguing that mind-blowing tools will unleash a "shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today."

"Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age," Altman writes. "From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy, and human will."

Why it matters: Altman's company stunned the world with ChatGPT, and now plans a rapid series of advances in text, voice and video. With his new promises, he's aiming to mitigate growing skepticism by policymakers and the public.

Zoom in: "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," Altman writes.

"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."

Between the lines: Call this Sam's Law — an AI-age counterpart to Moore's Law, the decades-old touchstone of chipmaking that predicated processing power would double roughly every two years.

Go deeper: Read Altman's post.

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Sam's Law: Altman heralds "The Intelligence Age"

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