AI companies sure have a funny marketing strategy.
When they’re not too busy predicting how their own tech will destroy the world, they like to insist that AI is well on its way to — or already has — surpassed the cognitive ability of humans. They’re grabbing customers by the shoulders, looking them dead in the eye, and telling them that they’ve now been rendered inferior beings. They’ll be honored, they seem to believe, to be a stepping stone towards progress (or tortured for eternity by a vindictive superintelligence for trying to stop AI from being brought about, according to certain utterly delusional corners of Silicon Valley.)
And that brings us to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Speaking at a conference in Abu Dhabi this week, Altman, whose company is under fire right now for allegedly disrespecting the entire field of mathematics, stressed that people should remain in control of the future, not AI. That’s when he snuck in a little side claim: that AI has now eclipsed even the brightest scientists — hence why it’s more urgent than ever that we keep a handle on our own destiny.
At the start of this year, “AI was mostly not as smart as our smartest scientists. And now it’s mostly smarter than them,” Altman said at the conference, in conversation with the editor-in-chief of the UAE state-owned paper The National.
Altman and OpenAI have long banged on about the intelligence of its models with respect to human scholars. When it released GPT-5 last year, it touted it as having “PhD-levels” of intelligence, and was routinely mocked for that obviously not being the case. Altman has also frequently predicted that AI will surpass human intelligence by the end of the decade.
This year, the “PhD-level” claim actually appeared to come true, sort of. OpenAI announced that it found a solution to the Navier-Stokes equations as laid out in the famous Millennium Prize Problems, something no human mathematician had ever solved. That caused a blowup (get it?) because a mathematician accused OpenAI of unfairly using his research, fueling discussions about how OpenAI was treating the math community.
OpenAI then poured fuel on the tire — or should we say, threw tons of paper on it — by simultaneously releasing hundreds of studies documenting purported solutions to even more math problems. Prominent mathematicians were incensed at how the community was being treated as unpaid proofreaders for OpenAI’s mountain of output, while OpenAI got to glorify their model as already matching their human intellect.
For Altman to come out and say that AI is now smarter than scientists when he has a significant chunk of the scientific community gunning for him is, shall we say, a choice. It’s also a claim that needs proof. The math fiasco is a good example of why it remains dubious. While the solutions appear technically correct, the actual natural language of the AI proofs are borderline incomprehensible, and it will probably take researchers years to unpack them all. As such, their actual utility to the field remains questionable.
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