<\/p>\n
(Bloomberg Opinion) — We have ChatGPT because Sam Altman wanted to build a god. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
For all the buzz, the chatbot is\u00a0only a prototype along the way to a\u00a0loftier goal of\u00a0AGI, or \u201cartificial general intelligence\u201d\u00a0that surpasses the cognitive abilities of humans. When Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015, he made it\u00a0the non-profit\u2019s goal. Five years earlier, Demis Hassabis co-founded DeepMind Technologies Ltd., now Google\u2019s core AI division, with the same AGI objective. Their reasons were\u00a0utopian: AGI would create financial abundance and be \u201cbroadly beneficial\u201d to humanity,\u00a0according to Altman. It would cure cancer and solve climate change, according to Hassabis. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
There are problems with these noble goals. First, the financial incentives of large tech firms are likely to skew AGI efforts towards benefiting their coffers first and foremost. Those early altruistic objectives of Altman and Hassabis have fallen by the wayside in the last few years as the generative AI boom has sparked a race to \u201cwin,\u201d\u00a0whatever that means. In the last few years, DeepMind\u2019s website has removed content on health research or\u00a0discovering new forms of energy creation to become more product-focused, spotlighting Google\u2019s flagship AI platform Gemini. Altman still talks about benefiting humanity, but he\u2019s no longer a non-profit \u201cfree from financial obligations\u201d per his 2015 founding statement, and more of a product arm of Microsoft Corp., which has since sunk roughly $13 billion into his company.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The other issue is that even the people who are building AGI\u00a0are fumbling in the dark, despite how sure they are of\u00a0their timeline predictions. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said we\u2019ll have AGI by 2027. Altman has said it\u2019s \u201ca few thousand days\u201d\u00a0away and we\u2019ll have the first AI agents joining the workforce this year. Billionaire Masayoshi Son\u00a0thinks we\u2019ll have it in two or three years. Ezra Klein, a New York Times podcaster who regularly has AI leaders on his show, recently wrote, \u201cIt\u2019s really about to happen. We\u2019re about to get to artificial general intelligence.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
But ask the tech\u00a0leaders what AGI actually means and you\u2019ll get a smorgasbord of answers. Hassabis describes it as software that can perform \u201cat human level.\u201d Altman says it will \u201coutperform humans.\u201d Both, alongside Amodei, often take greater pains to talk about the complexity and challenges of defining AGI. Altman has also called it a \u201cweakly defined term.\u201d And Microsoft Chief Executive Officer\u00a0Satya Nadella has even derided the AGI effort as\u00a0\u201cnonsensical benchmark hacking.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
I get little comfort from seeing AI\u2019s top leaders trash talking or dancing around the definition of their North Star, while simultaneously racing\u00a0toward it. Not just because computer-science experts, along with Elon Musk, worry that the advent of AGI will also come with rather high stakes,\u00a0existential risks to human civilization. But because\u00a0tilting at a vaguely defined goal opens the door to unintended consequences. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
A more worthwhile aspiration would be narrower and more concrete, such as building AI systems that reduce medical\u00a0diagnostic errors by 30%.\u00a0Or in education, improving\u00a0math proficiency in students by 15%. Or systems that could\u00a0enhance energy grids to\u00a0reduce carbon emissions by 20%. Such goals not only have clear metrics for success but serve concrete human needs, just as AI builders like Altman and Hassabis originally envisioned. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
There is no evidence that when a company like Google or Microsoft (or China\u2019s DeepSeek) claim to have finally built AGI, they will have the key to curing cancer, solving climate change or increasing the wealth of everyone on earth by \u201ctrillions\u201d of dollars, per Altman. So intense has the arms race become that it seems more likely they will instead\u00a0position themselves as having a competitive advantage in the market, raise\u00a0prices and lock\u00a0down information sharing. There will be questions about\u00a0geopolitical ramifications. When he founded OpenAI, Altman said\u00a0that if his team ever noticed another research lab was getting closer to AGI, they would down tools and collaborate. That looks like a pipe dream today. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Last month a large group of academic and corporate AI researchers published a paper that called on tech firms\u00a0to stop making AGI the be-all and end-all of AI research.\u00a0They argued that not only was the term\u00a0too vague to measure properly, creating a recipe for bad science, it left key people out of the conversation \u2014\u00a0namely, all those whose lives would be changed. Technologists in 2025 have far more societal power than they did at the turn of the millennium,\u00a0able to reshape culture and individual habits with the social media products they\u2019ve deployed, and now large swathes of jobs too\u00a0with AI,\u00a0with few checks and balances.\u00a0 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The researchers, including Google\u2019s former AI ethics lead Margaret Mitchell, suggest not only that tech firms include more voices from different communities and fields of expertise in their AI work, but that they drop the vague shtick about AGI, which one scientist memorably defined for me as \u201cthe rapture for nerds.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The obsession with \u201cbigger is better\u201d has gone on long enough in Silicon Valley, as has the jostling between people like Musk and Altman to have the biggest AI model or the biggest cluster of Nvidia Corp.\u2019s AI chips. J. Robert Oppenheimer had much regret for his role as the father of the atomic bomb, and now epitomizes the notion that \u201cjust because you can, doesn\u2019t mean you should.\u201dRather than look back in hindsight with remorse, tech leaders would do well to\u00a0avoid\u00a0the same trap of gunning for glory and trying to\u00a0build gods, especially when the benefits are far from certain.\u00a0 More from Bloomberg Opinion: <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of \u201cSupremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com\/opinion<\/a> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Catch all the Technology<\/a> News and Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App<\/a> to get Daily Market Updates<\/a> & Live Business News<\/a>.<\/p>\n More<\/span>Less<\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (Bloomberg Opinion) — We have ChatGPT because Sam Altman wanted to build a god. For all the buzz, the chatbot is\u00a0only a prototype along the way to a\u00a0loftier goal of\u00a0AGI, or \u201cartificial general intelligence\u201d\u00a0that surpasses the cognitive abilities of humans. When Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015, he made it\u00a0the non-profit\u2019s goal. Five years earlier, Demis […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":360602,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9379,7785,9493,188,183,5834,185,186,187,184,189,150,182,32573,190],"class_list":["post-382909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-agi","tag-ai-research","tag-artificial-general-intelligence","tag-blockchain-tech","tag-blockchain-technology","tag-chatgpt","tag-crypto-technology","tag-cryptocurrency-technology","tag-metaverse-technology","tag-nft-technology","tag-soul-bound-token","tag-tech","tag-technology","tag-technology-firms","tag-token-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382909"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":382911,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382909\/revisions\/382911"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/360602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}