- Sam Altman recently told students that the age of “outrunning AI” is over.
- They should develop new skills to compete in a changing world, the OpenAI CEO added.
- OpenAI’s CPO said to ask yourself when doing something new: “Is there a way that AI could help me do this faster?”
Sam Altman says it isn’t a matter of if AI is going to outpace humans, but when.
“You will not outrun the AI on raw horsepower,” Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said in a Q&A session alongside OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil earlier this month with students at the University of Tokyo. “That’s over. That’s probably over this year.”
So what’s a human to do?
Weil, who has previously worked at Facebook and Instagram, said the sooner students start integrating AI into their daily lives, the better prepared they’ll be when it crops up in future professions.
“To me, the lesson in there, the thing to take away now, is just start using these tools,” the chief product officer said. “Start incorporating them into the way that you work, into the way that you study. When you’re doing something new, ask yourself, ‘Is there a way that AI could help me do this faster?'”
Altman said that if students are worried, they should try thinking about it differently.
“I think that the wrong way to think about it is just like — this thing is going to happen, and like it’s going to beat us at everything,” Altman said. “What will happen is, it’ll be like step-by-step evolving together, and what we do will be unimaginable to people that used to have to work without this technology.”
Altman told the students that trying to best AI in terms of pure skill is like trying to “outrun the calculator” at arithmetic.
“Are you going to be better at the AI at math, or a better programmer than the AI on its own, or better at physics?” Altman said. “The answer is no, you will not be better at any of those things. And so specific skills — you’ll be able to do things with AI that no one could do before, and there’ll be new ways to work with it.”
In Altman’s vision of the future, AI is so far advanced that everyone has access to the equivalent of “the most competent company on Earth.” To compete in that cutting-edge world, Altman recommended the students in attendance develop new skills to help them leverage AI to their advantage.
“The skills that you need in that world are figuring out what people want, sort of creative vision, quick adaptability, resilience as everything is changing around you, and the sort of learning how to work with these tools to do way more than people could without it,” Altman said.
When students do enter the workforce, Weil said they could benefit from keeping AI in mind. The best-positioned companies are those that see the technology as a potential boost, rather than a competitor, he added.
“If you’re building something, and you’re nervous about our next model release because it might be able to do the thing that you’re doing, that’s not a good place to be,” Weil said. “But if you’re building something and you can’t wait for our next model release, because you’re just at the edge of capabilities and our next model release that’ll be that much smarter is going to make your product amazing, that’s a good place to be.”
OpenAI, which generates revenue from selling access to its AI models to companies as well as consumers, was valued at $157 billion in October — making it one of the world’s most valuable startups. The company launched its first AI agent, Operator, to subscribers paying $200 a month for a ChatGPT Pro subscription in January.
Also in January, Altman wrote a blog post predicting the entry of the first “AI agents” into the workforce by 2025, programs that could “materially change the output of companies.”
On Sunday, Altman published a new blog post titled “Three Observations,” where he invited the reader to think of an AI agent as a “real-but-relatively-junior virtual coworker.”
“Now imagine 1,000 of them. Or 1 million of them,” Altman wrote. “Now imagine such agents in every field of knowledge work.”
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