Sam Altman: Biggest Shift in Human History Coming

St. Croix Times Staff

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, told a Senate hearing on U.S. competitiveness in Artificial Intelligence (AI) that the AI boom “will be at least as big as the internet, maybe bigger.” He admitted there will be a shift so profound that even the creators “can’t quite wrap our heads around what’s coming.”

He called it one of the biggest tech revolutions in history and said we must approach it with humility and caution to guide us into the future. 

Pressed by Sen. John Fetterman about the so-called singularity - the moment machines outstrip human intelligence - Mr. Altman replied, “I am incredibly excited about the progress, but I am also cautious…I feel  small next to it.”  He added that society will adapt, and figure out how to use AI tools that will unlock things we’ve never been able to do - but will also carry unknown risks. 

“It will be among the biggest, maybe the biggest technological revolutions humanity will have produced,” Mr. Altman stated.

The hearing focused on U.S. competitiveness in AI, with lawmakers warning about skyrocketing power demands from data centers, AI-generated deepfakes, and China’s rapid growth. But Tech executives urged lighter regulation and heavy infrastructure spending, in order to keep pace with China. 

Mr. Altman’s remarks come amid growing scrutiny of OpenAI’s safety practices, with past employees raising concerns about transparency and retaliation. 

As lawmakers demand answers, other Tech Giants like Elon Musk and Microsoft’s Eric Schmidt warn that super intelligent AI could reshape humanity and possibly outpace it. 

“AI could put a smartest human in every pocket by 2031,” Mr. Schmidt has been quoted. 

Mr. Altman said “we could very well be facing a whole new era in human history.”

OpenAI, Inc, is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization founded in 2015 in San Francisco, California. It aims to develop safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence (AGI) which it defines as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” Open AI is known for the GPT family of large language models, the DALL-E series of text-to-image models, and a text-to-video model named Sora. Its release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has been credited with catalyzing widespread interest in generative AI. Elon Musk is one of its Founders.