Over the years, Openai CEO Sam Altman has shared predictions about what we think we are heading for artificial general information, Superintelligence, Agent AI and more, and when we might get there.
There are several general themes.
He believes that AGI defines “ChatGpt Maker Openai as “generally smarter AI systems than humans” – but increases productivity by handling masculine tasks to free people for more abstract work and decision-making.
He also said in a May 2024 interview at Harvard Business School that he would create “shared intelligence,” and in a 2024 blog post he would mark the arrival of “Massive Prosperity.”
One day, everyone wrote in his 2024 blog, “having a personal AI team full of virtual experts from various fields, working together to create almost everything we can imagine.”
“AI models will quickly act as an autonomous personal assistant who performs certain tasks like coordinating healthcare on your behalf. Going further down the path, AI systems will get much better, helping to make next-generation systems better and make scientific advances across the board,” he added.
As far as timelines go, Altman wrote in a January 2025 blog post this year, “thinking that the first AI agents will 'see to join the workforce', potentially changing the results of the company significantly.”
He said at the New York Times dealbook summit in December that he believes he will achieve AGI faster than most people in the world think.
Related Stories
Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know
Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know
“We are now convinced that we know how to build an AGI, just as we traditionally understood that,” he added in a January post.
Beyond AGI, the company is also paying attention to super intelligence, which it defines as “dramatically more capable future AI systems than AGI.”
“Super intelligent tools can accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what you can do for yourself, and significantly increase your abundance and prosperity,” he wrote in a blog post earlier this year.
Altman spoke about AI funding in a February 2025 blog post.
He said the cost of using certain AI drops about 10 times a year, and “there is no reason to increase investments in the near future.”
“If we don't build enough infrastructure, AI will become a very limited resource, wars will be fought, and that will become a tool primarily for the rich,” he wrote last year. He cited the need to reduce computing costs and the massive demand for sufficient chips and energy to power AI.
Altman believes that AI will lower prices for many products in the future, but “the price of luxury goods and inherently limited resources like land could rise even more dramatically,” he wrote.
Secondly, there are potential impacts on people's work.
“Most jobs change slowly than most people think. They are not afraid to run out of what we need to do (even if they don't look like a 'real job' to us today),' he wrote in a 2024 blog post.
At the same time, he admitted in 2023 that many people would lose their jobs in the process.
“A lot of people working on AI will not only be good, but not just a supplement, and no one will be replaced,” he said. “Work will definitely go away, a complete stop.”
He believes there is a “more trend towards individual empowerment” with AGI, but in a blog post in February, he said, “One other possible path we can see is that AI is being used to control populations through mass surveillance of autonomy and loss of autonomy.”
And his darkest statement on AI is still: The worst-case scenario is “lit up for all of us,” he said in a 2023 interview.
To that end, Altman spoke about the need for guardrails to ensure responsible AI development.
“I don't think it's possible to overstate the importance of AI safety and alignment work. I want to see more happening,” he said in a 2023 interview.
“The world doesn't change everything at once. It never does,” he wrote in a blog post in February. “But the future will come to us in ways that are impossible to ignore. And the long-term changes in our society and economy will be enormous. We will find new things to do, new ways to help each other, and new ways to compete, but they may not resemble the work we do today.”
In fact, Altman thinks that tomorrow's work will be “silly and stupid from a current perspective.”
“Podcast buddies weren't really a job that long ago. You've found a way to monetize it. You're doing great things. “But do subsistence farmers see this as a job, or do you see it as if you're playing a game to entertain yourself?”
