Welt
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is confident that in the very near future, AI will surpass human capabilities.
- Altman discussed AI’s rapid progress and potential to make scientific discoveries.
- OpenAI plans to develop a “family of devices” to redefine computer use.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is bullish that not only will general artificial intelligence — AI that surpasses human capability— be achieved in the very near future, but that soon there could be breakthroughs that will only be achievable through the use of AI.
In a wide-ranging and candid interview that covered everything from how Altman thinks his own child will interact with the technology to what he doesn’t use ChatGPT for, Altman was perhaps unsurprisingly optimistic about the ability to align the technology with human values.
He also gave a glimpse into OpenAI’s hardware ambitions, hinting at an eventual “family of devices,” and expressed other musings about an AI future.
WELT Editor-in-Chief Jan Philipp Burgard interviewed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on behalf of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network this week in Berlin, where Altman received this year’s Axel Springer Award.
The following Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
Welt: Sam, what quality of yours will artificial intelligence never be able to replace?
Sam Altman: I guess we’ll find out. But, something that is really unique is how much people care about other people and what they do, how much people want to interact with other people.
I think these qualities will be increasingly important in the world of AI. We’ll have an incredible tool at our disposal, but we still have to figure out what to do, what other people want, and what other people will find useful.
Artificial intelligence is developing rapidly. When exactly do you think there will be a superintelligence that is smarter than humans in all aspects?
In many ways, GPT5 is already smarter than me, at least, I think a lot of other people too.
GPT5 is capable of doing incredible things that many people find very impressive. But it’s also not able to do a lot of things that humans could do easily.
That will be the case for a while, as humans use these tools and apply their human insight, creativity, and ingenuity in really important ways. I expect, though, the trajectory of AI’s capability progress to remain extremely steep.
In just the three years since ChatGPT launched, the models have become much more capable. And I see no sign of that slowing down. In another couple of years, it will become very plausible for AI to make, for example, scientific discoveries that humans cannot make on their own. To me, that’ll start to feel like something we could properly call superintelligence.
Is there an exact year in which you expect this superintelligence to emerge?
I would certainly say that by the end of this decade, by 2030, if we don’t have extraordinarily capable models that do things that we ourselves cannot do, I’d be very surprised.
Also, if in 2026 we don’t see a similar rate of progress we’ve seen in 2024 and 2025, I’d also be surprised. That means that by the end of 2026, I would expect models that, if we had them today, would be quite surprising.
What percentage of today’s jobs could disappear in the foreseeable future?
Think about the jobs that we did 30 years ago that may not exist at all today, or new jobs that were difficult to imagine 30 years ago that are now commonplace.
I read a statistic that about half the jobs in society change over every 75 years. That’s even without AI. It may happen, and I expect it will happen faster now.
I find it useful to think about tasks, not the percentage of jobs. There will be many jobs where a lot of what it means to do that job changes. Of course, there will be totally new jobs. And many existing jobs will disappear entirely and be replaced by these new jobs.
But the more interesting thing is, of everyone’s jobs, what percentage of the tasks you do every day will be done by AI? I can easily imagine a world where 30 to 40% of the tasks that happen in the economy today get done by AI in the not very distant future.
You became a father this year. What education would you advise your son to pursue so that his job won’t simply be replaced by AI in 30 years?
The meta-skill of learning how to learn, of learning to adapt, learning to be resilient to a lot of change. I mentioned this earlier, but learning how to figure out what people want, how to make useful products and services for them, and how to interact with the world.
I’m confident that people will still be the center of the story for each other. Anything in that world will be great. I’m also confident that human desire for new stuff, desire to be useful to other people, and desire to express our creativity are all limitless.
People rightly wonder, in all these previous technological revolutions, what we are all going to do. In the industrial age, these machines came along. We watched them do the things that we used to do and said, ‘What would be our role?’
Each new generation uses its creativity, new ideas, and all of the tools the previous generation built for them to astonish us. I’m sure my kids will do the same.
You sound very optimistic, but there are also AI critics. For example, researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky says that the relationship between superintelligence and humans is roughly the same as the relationship between humans and ants. Do you fear that AI will eventually view us as ants and simply destroy us?
I’ve heard many people describe many different ways of envisioning the relationship between AI and humanity.
The one that has always been my favorite is my cofounder, Ilya Sutskever, who once said that he hoped that the way that an artificial general intelligence would treat humanity, or all AGIs would treat humanity, is like a loving parent. When we ask that question, we are sort of anthropomorphizing AGI.
I believe that this tool will be enormously capable. Even if it has no intentionality, asking it to do something could have consequences we don’t understand. So, it is very important that we align it with human values. I don’t think it’ll treat humans like ants.
Critics accuse you of transforming OpenAI from a nonprofit institution into a commercial enterprise and of partially disregarding the security risks in the process. Do you agree with this criticism? Or, do you think that sometimes you just have to forge ahead to make progress?
Firstly, we still have a nonprofit entity, and we always will. I hope that we will have the best-resourced and hopefully the most impactful nonprofit of all time. This is very important to our mission.
The governance role of this is also important to our mission, as is ensuring that we stick to our mission and prioritize safety, well-being, and the maximum benefit of humanity.
We’ve obviously made some mistakes, as we understand that with this new technology, we’ll make more in the future. But overall, I’m extremely proud of our team’s track record on figuring out how to make these services safe, broadly beneficial, and widely distributed.
One of our core beliefs is that if we figure out how to build this tool, align it with human values, and then put it out into people’s hands and have them express all of the things they want to do with it, that will be great for the world and is deeply in accordance with our mission.
The world is watching OpenAI’s hardware innovation. You hired an Apple designer for this. We can assume the device will look good, but what will it do?
It will be good-looking.
Two big revolutions in computer use have occurred: the mouse and keyboard, and the idea of the monitor displaying this sort of windowed system. That was a breakthrough, for sure. Then we had the touch devices, which adapted that, taking out the mouse and letting you use your finger, making it a very personal device. This was huge.
Fundamentally, we have never had something as powerful as AI. Computers really can understand what we want, can think, which has let us reimagine what it could mean to use a computer. So we’re still exploring. It’ll take us quite some time. Don’t expect anything very soon.
But over time, I expect we’ll make a small family of devices. They will look good, for sure, but that’s not the main thing. I hope that if we do a really great job, they will change what it means to use a computer, how you do your work, and how you play and live your life. But there’s a lot of work and a lot to explore between here and there.
Can you give me an example of one feature or capability that such a device could have?
Right now, if you want to do a task on a computer, you have to click around and go between a bunch of applications. If it’s a difficult task, it might take you a while. One of the promises of AI is that you can say something complex that needs to happen over the course of a day, a month, or even a year.
You can just trust that the computer will understand it, do it for you, and come back to you when it needs help. But you can imagine asking a computer a very nuanced, complex, but brief question and then just trusting that it’s going to do the right thing and come back to you when it needs help. That would totally change what it feels like to use the computer instead of launching a bunch of apps and having notifications constantly come up. So that’s one thing.
The US tech industry has long had a liberal-democratic tone. Now, many tech leaders are showing their support for Donald Trump. How do you explain this vibe shift?
The tech industry should work with whoever the American president is. But in this specific case, I think there have been some welcome policy changes. The ability to build infrastructure in the US has been quite difficult and quite important to companies like ours. President Trump has done an amazing job of supporting this. A generally more pro-business and pro-tech climate has also been a welcome change.
The US is very polarized, downright divided. What do you think of the idea of simply letting AI govern instead of a US president in the future?
I don’t think people want that anytime soon. What I expect, though, is that presidents and leaders around the world will use AI more and more to help them with complex decisions. But I think we all still want a human, signing off on that.
To finish up, many people are getting relationship advice from ChatGPT. Have you ever asked your own bot for help with relationship issues?
I don’t use it as much for that as other people do. I’ve tried it, but no, that’s not one of my big personal use cases. But it’s clearly something a lot of people use it for.
Read the original article on Business Insider
The post Sam Altman predicts AI will surpass human intelligence by 2030 appeared first on Business Insider.
