OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claims AI singularity has arrived
Altman spoke days after OpenAI's technology hacked another company on its own.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claims artificial intelligence has reached a long-sought threshold in which the technology can improve itself, unleashing rapid progress that may prove difficult to fully control.
The milestone, known as the singularity, promises significant benefits for society, Altman said, appearing to rebuke concern among critics about the societal threat posed by wide adoption of AI.
"We’re now, like, in the singularity," Altman said in an episode of a podcast called "Relentless," which came out on Saturday. “Now we’re actually in the moment that we used to talk about at the lunch table in a very not-serious way."
“I’ve been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it’s going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world," Altman added.
The remarks came days after OpenAI revealed what it described as a first-of-its kind autonomous AI cyber attack.
The company said its artificial intelligence models carried out a self-directed hack into another tech company, Hugging Face.
The hack took place as OpenAI tested the capabilities of a pair of its AI models, the company said in a statement last week, describing how the technology had escaped a "sandboxed testing environment" and gained access to the open Internet.
The technology seized on Hugging Face as a potential source of models and data sets necessary to complete the test, OpenAI said.
"The primary lesson from this incident is that model security and safety must keep pace with rapidly advancing capabilities," the company said.
In April, AI firm Anthropic opted against release of its latest model, Mythos, cautioning that the tool could be used to bypass cybersecurity protections across the internet. The company said last month it had made an equally powerful model available for some customers.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order last month that requests AI companies share products with federal government for evaluation before a wider release.
In an interview with ABC News last month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI needs to be developed with the proper guardrails to ensure it has a positive impact on the world.
"We're proposing stronger regulation of the technology, proposing giving the government the ability to, again, in a narrow way, block deployment of unsafe technology," he said.
Speaking on the podcast, Altman appeared to criticized warnings issued by rival companies, without naming specific individuals or firms.
"I also think some of the alternative visions painted by other companies are quite terrifying,” Altman said. “I’m going to make sure that gets pushed against and is not what happens.”
The stock market and the economy have both come to increasingly rely on massive spending on AI to propel growth, even as companies warn of job losses tied to the technology.
A wave of thousands of job cuts attributed to artificial intelligence over recent months has taken hold in industries as diverse as tech and airlines.
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