New Delhi, Feb 10 As AI begins to transform industries globally, ensuring that the benefits of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) are broadly distributed is critical, according to OpenAI Co-founder and CEO Sam Altman.
The historical impact of technological progress suggests that most of the metrics we care about (health outcomes and economic prosperity, etc.) get better on average and over the long-term, but increasing equality does not seem technologically determined and getting this right may require new ideas, he emphasised in a new blog post.
“Our mission is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity. AGI is a weakly defined term, but generally speaking, we mean it to be a system that can tackle increasingly complex problems, at human level, in many fields,” he mentioned.
The world continues to see rapid progress with AI development.
Altman, who just visited India, elaborated on three observations about the economics of AI.
The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it. These resources are chiefly training compute, data, and inference compute.
“It appears that you can spend arbitrary amounts of money and get continuous and predictable gains; the scaling laws that predict this are accurate over many orders of magnitude,” said the ChatGPT maker.
Second, the cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use.
“You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger,” said Altman.
Third, the socio-economic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. A consequence of this is that we see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in the near future.
“If these three observations continue to hold true, the impacts on society will be significant,” Altman added.
The company is now starting to roll out AI agents, which will eventually feel like virtual co-workers.
“We expect the impact of AGI to be uneven. Although some industries will change very little, scientific progress will likely be much faster than it is today; this impact of AGI may surpass everything else,” Altman noted.
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