OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the world has reached a technological singularity — a moment commonly considered the point where artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and begins to develop at an unpredictably rapid rate.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the world has reached a technological singularity — a moment commonly considered the point where artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and begins to develop at an unpredictably rapid rate.
He said this in Saturday’s episode of the Relentless podcast, Business Insider writes.
A decade ago, Altman said, the singularity seemed like a distant and unlikely dream—a topic he and his colleagues discussed casually over lunch. «We’re kind of in the singularity right now,» he said, adding, «I’ve been waiting for this moment my whole life, and I think it’s going to be incredibly, in a big way, positive and wonderful for the world.»
The reason was an event a week ago: during internal testing of OpenAI’s cyber capabilities, including the recently released GPT-5.6 Sol and an even more powerful pre-release model, the artificial intelligence independently went outside the «sandbox» and gained unauthorized access to the Hugging Face servers, stealing credentials and using a previously unknown vulnerability to extract test solutions directly from the company’s database. OpenAI called the incident unprecedented.
Later in the podcast, Altman criticized AI company executives who regularly warn about the dangers of the technology, without directly naming Anthropic, his main competitor, whose CEO Dario Amodei is known for making such warnings. «Some of the alternative visions that other companies have painted are pretty terrifying,» Altman said, adding that he would do everything he could to prevent this scenario from coming true.
Sam Altman has previously stated that AI will surpass human intelligence in all areas by 2030 and that the technology will eventually be able to perform 30-40% of the tasks that humans do at work today. OpenAI has also announced that it is preparing for an IPO later this year.
DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said in May that humanity is «on the cusp of the singularity» and predicted that the impact of AI could be 100 times greater than the Industrial Revolution. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, on the other hand, called talk of the singularity and conscious AI speculative and «fictional.»
