Sam Altman’s strategic ambiguity on AI sounds a lot like doublespeak

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Remember when OpenAI’s nonprofit board unceremoniously fired Sam Altman? It was a four-day spell in the wilderness for its CEO, sparked by the claim he hadn’t been “consistently candid" with the directors. A year later, Altman isn’t being very consistent about the future of artificial intelligence (AI).

In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek published on Monday, Altman admitted that he’d once conjured a “totally random" date for when OpenAI would build artificial general intelligence (AGI), a theoretical threshold when AI surpasses human intelligence. It would be 2025, a decade out from the company’s founding. Altman’s candour about that mistake was momentarily refreshing until he breezily made another prediction in the same interview: “I think AGI will probably get developed during this president’s term," he said.

He made a bigger claim in a personal blog post on Monday that we would see AI “agents" join the workforce this year that “materially change the output of companies." Altman has become a master of modulating between humility and hype. He’ll admit to his past guesswork while making equally speculative new predictions about the future, a confusing cocktail that deflects attention from thornier current issues. Take all his pronouncements with a large pinch of salt.