✨ While tech CEOs talk up AGI imminence, real-world AI use cases emerge

Sam Altman: 'We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies'

In a blog post published yesterday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reflects on the past two years since the company rolled out ChatGPT, including the company’s rapid growth and his temporary ouster. But I think he buries the lede:

We are now confident we know how to build [artificial general intelligence] as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies. … We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.

This sounds like science fiction right now, and somewhat crazy to even talk about it. That’s alright—we’ve been there before and we’re OK with being there again. We’re pretty confident that in the next few years, everyone will see what we see, and that the need to act with great care, while still maximizing broad benefit and empowerment, is so important.

The Altman post syncs nicely with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s long essay from last October, “Machines of Loving Grace,” in which he writes that “powerful AI,” he term forAGI, “could come as early as 2026, though there are also ways it could take much longer." Like Altman, Amodei describes the “radical upside” of transformative breakthroughs in health, biology, and economic development — suggesting AI could compress a century of medical progress into five to 10 years while enabling developing nations to achieve 20 percent annual GDP growth. (Both Altman and Amodei also emphasize the need to carefully manage risks while maximizing benefits.)

AI leaders signal AGI's imminent arrival, kind of

Are these two tech bosses each talking their own books? Of course they are. But that doesn’t mean they don’t believe what they are saying.