I.T. News – February 11, 2025

Sam Altman on how life will change once AGI steals your job – and what ChatGPT thinks about it

BGR. February 10, 2025.

Reading a blog post from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on this particular Monday in February makes perfect sense, considering what’s happening in the world right now. The AI Action Summit in Paris has world leaders and tech execs in attendence, discussing AI’s future and potential regulation needed to safeguard the space.

Sam Altman penned a blog post titled Three Observations, sharing a mission statement for the future of ChatGPT and other OpenAI technology, with a clear focus on AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). The CEO gives us his incredibly optimistic view of what AGI and AI agents will mean for the world in the near and more distant future and what life might be like once AGI and AI agents steal your jobs.

The mission statement came at the end of an incredibly important period for OpenAI, and it was all the more important considering the headwinds OpenAI had to face.

In the past few weeks, the company released the first AI agents (Operator and Deep Research) and made available two ChatGPT o3 models, all part of a massive money-raising campaign that proved successful. That’s despite the ongoing tradition of ChatGPT safety researchers leaving the company or the unexpected competition from Chinese rival DeepSeek.

I wondered what OpenAI’s main creation would think about the blog, so I went to ChatGPT (GPT-4o) to ask the AI how it felt about the blog post. As expected, the AI recognized the mission statement is about technologies similar to itself, without having any feelings about it. ChatGPT also highlighted concenrs with Altman’s line of carefully edited thinking.

Altman’s view of the post-AGI world

Altman started the blog by explaining AGI after making it clear that OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that AGI benefits humanity. As you’re about to see, the exec didn’t offer a perfectly objective explanation for AGI or what AGI means from the Microsoft-OpenAI business relationship:

Systems that start to point to AGI* are coming into view, and so we think it’s important to understand the moment we are in. AGI is a weakly defined term, but generally speaking we mean it to be a system that can tackle increasingly complex problems, at human level, in many fields.

Altman then explained the rapid progress in AI development, indicating that the cost of an AI product tends to fall by ten times every 12 months, leading to increased usage. GPT-4 prices from early 2023 dropped by about 150 times by the time ChatGPT reached the GPT-4o model in mid-2024.

The CEO also made it clear that OpenAI won’t stop investing in AI hardware in the near future, which is likely a needed remark in a post-DeepSeek world. A few weeks ago, the Chinese AI stunned the world with its ChatGPT-like abilities obtained at much lower costs.

All these AI developments will lead to the next phase of AI evolution, including AI agents, towards the age of AGI. That’s where Altman gave an example of AI agent working as a software engineer:

Let’s imagine the case of a software engineering agent, which is an agent that we expect to be particularly important. Imagine that this agent will eventually be capable of doing most things a software engineer at a top company with a few years of experience could do, for tasks up to a couple of days long. It will not have the biggest new ideas, it will require lots of human supervision and direction, and it will be great at some things but surprisingly bad at others.

Altman didn’t say this engineer would take the job of a human, but he might have just as well said it. Imagine millions of AI agents taking over jobs in countless fields:

Still, imagine it as a real-but-relatively-junior virtual coworker. Now imagine 1,000 of them. Or 1 million of them. Now imagine such agents in every field of knowledge work.

Yes, that’s a nightmare scenario to some people, and it’s easy to understand why, even though

Episode 4092 - Feb 12 - Tiếng Anh - Công nghệ Thông tin – Ngày 11 tháng 2, 2025 - Vina Technology at AI time

Vina Technology at AI time - Công nghệ Việt Nam thời AI

Episode 4092 - Feb 12 - Tiếng Anh - Công nghệ Thông tin – Ngày 11 tháng 2, 2025 - Vina Technology at AI time