OpenAI's CEO vision of humanity's AI-powered glorious future: 'Fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics'

There's nothing innately newsworthy about a technology boss promoting the benefits of their products but when the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT reckons that deep learning will lead humanity into a new Age, solve climate change, and discover all of physics then it's certainly worth raising an eyebrow, at least.

I am, of course, talking about Sam Altman of OpenAI, who is perhaps the most vocal proponent of artificial intelligence at the moment. His latest musings (via The Verge), though, do read more like a piece of science fiction than a detailed breakdown of what the future holds for deep learning.

One expects a CEO to be ebullient about their product and make lofty but ambiguous claims, but Altman is taking things another step beyond all of that. «I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now,» says Altman, before going on to do just that.

His first claim is that AI will ultimately usher us all into a new era of human history—just as the Industrial Age gave way to the Information Age, Alman reckons it'll be the Intelligence Age soon enough, all thanks to deep learning.

«Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy, and human will,» he writes, though I believe he may have forgotten to add the phrase 'obscene amount of cash' somewhere in those final parts.

Altman goes on to cheer us all into the future: «The dawn of the Intelligence Age is a momentous development with very complex and extremely high-stakes challenges. It will not be an entirely positive story, but the upside is so tremendous that we owe it to ourselves, and the future, to figure out how to navigate the risks in front of us.»

Wait a second. Not an entirely positive story? That doesn't sound especially encouraging to me, but fear not, OpenAI's CEO is certain it'll all be worth it.

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