The “magic” he was referring to would be possible because of something called superintelligence, which he said might emerge in a “few thousand days”.
So what is superintelligence?
Artificial superintelligence or ASI is an AI system whose cognitive performance exceeds that of the human mind across all domains of interest, whether scientific creativity, general wisdom or social skills.
A blog by IBM defines ASI thus: “In essence, an ASI would be an inexhaustible, hyper-intelligent super-being. A nearly perfect supercomputer available 24/7, with the ability to process and analyse any amount of data with speed and precision that we can’t yet comprehend.”
In October 2024, SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son predicted that ASI will exist by 2035 and that it will be 10,000 times smarter than a human brain. Last week, Son even said that the company aims to become the biggest platform provider for ASI within the next 10 years.
But here’s the problem. We haven’t even achieved AGI.
What is AGI? “Artificial general intelligence refers to the hypothetical intelligence of a machine that possesses the ability to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can,” as per a blog by Google Cloud.
To put it simply, it is AI that functions on par with the human brain. So, creating AGI is essentially the next step towards achieving superintelligence. At a New York Times DealBook Summit last year, Altman had speculated that AGI could potentially emerge this year. He reaffirmed the same in a blog, saying “we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies.”
Companies in pursuit of superintelligence
Though superintelligence may seem far away, several companies are focused on developing it, driven by the hope of a breakthrough that could take technology to a whole new level.
OpenAI: “OpenAI is a lot of things now,” said Altman in a blog about superintelligence. “But before anything else, we are a superintelligence research company.”
Meta: The Mark Zuckerberg-led company recently announced a major restructuring of its artificial intelligence group, including a commitment to developing superintelligence.
He told his employees that Meta’s AI efforts will fall under a new group called Meta Superintelligence Labs, which will be led by Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of data-labelling startup Scale AI.
Safe Superintelligence: The name pretty much gives away what the company stands for. “Building safe superintelligence (SSI) is the most important technical problem of our time,” the company said on its website.
“SSI is our mission, our name, and our entire product roadmap, because it is our sole focus. Our team, investors, and business model are all aligned to achieve SSI,” the company said.
Reflection AI: This startup, founded by former Google DeepMind researchers, is working on an autonomous programming tool. They believe the same core technology could eventually be used to develop superintelligence, according to tech news site Silicon Angle.
Deepinvent: This is a Silicon Valley startup developing a lightweight, scalable approach to superintelligence.
