Writing in his bog, Altman insists that “deep learning works” and can generalise across various domains and complex problems based on its training data, enabling humanity to “solve hard problems” like “fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all physics.”

“That’s really it; humanity discovered an algorithm that could truly learn any distribution of data (or the underlying ‘rules’ that produce any distribution of data). To a shocking degree of precision, the more computing and data available, the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems. No matter how much time I spend thinking about this, I can never internalise how consequential it is.”

Altman also claimed that superintelligence—AI that is “vastly smarter than humans”—could be achieved in “a few thousand days.”

“This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. We may have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there.”

Many AI researchers, particularly those at OpenAI, have been chasing the dream of superintelligence, often called artificial general intelligence (AGI) in its less advanced form. Former OpenAI chief scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever’s new startup is even focused on achieving safe superintelligence.

“There are a lot of details we still have to figure out, but it’s a mistake to get distracted by any particular challenge,” Altman said. “Deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems. We can say a lot of things about what may happen next, but the main one is that AI is going to get better with scale, and that will lead to meaningful improvements to the lives of people around the world.”

He added that AI will soon enable everyone to achieve more, with each person having a personal AI team of virtual experts in various fields, and children having personal tutors for any subject.