The world is living in an era of AI that is evolving at breakneck speed. The day is not far when humanity will witness the dawn of “artificial superintelligence.”
Given the trajectory of AI-related developments, tech giants believe that humans will experience superintelligence in the near future.
This is what OpenAI CEO Sam Altman thinks and predicts. Addressing attendees at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Altman revealed the timeline for AI superintelligence.
“We think that on our current trajectory, we may be only a few years away from an early version of true superintelligence,” Altman said.
“If we’re right, by the end of 2028, more of the world’s electronic capacity could reside inside data centers rather than outside them,” he added.
The CEO of the ChatGPT maker also said that suggesting a timeline could be wrong, but it really needs to be seriously considered.
At some point in the evolution curve, Altman says, superintelligence “will be able to do better work than most corporate CEOs and do better research than the best scientists.”
The idea of artificial superintelligence is not new, and many tech giants, including Microsoft CEO Mustafa Suleiman, have promoted it as part of the “singularity.”
But last year, Suleiman set out a goal for Microsoft AI to become a “humanistic superintelligence.”
Humanist SuperIntelligence (HSI) with advanced AI capabilities will be designed to serve people and humanity more generally, according to a Microsoft AI blog post.
“We think of AI as a system that tends to be problem-oriented and domain-specific; rather than an open-ended entity with a high degree of autonomy, it is carefully calibrated and contextualized within limits,” the blog post says.
Artificial superintelligence refers to a hypothetical stage in the development of AI in which the cognitive capabilities of machines far exceed those of humans in every conceivable domain, including conventional wisdom, the creative arts, work, and scientific reasoning.
Now in 2026, the agent AI phase is in full swing, moving to a stage where AI systems can plan and execute multi-tasks autonomously.
In the case of superintelligence, there will be all kinds of confusion. Jobs will be automated. Inequality will prevail. Governance issues for AI will intensify, and humans will no longer be able to control values.
Humans are unlikely to be prepared for this massive technological revolution, as the superintelligence stage could turn humans into obsolete beings.
