Sam Altman changes his stance on AGI, says 'It'll change the world but much less than we all think'

ChatGPT maker OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, while speaking at a conversation organized by Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos, shifted away from some of his earlier, more alarming statements about AI.

Previously, he had co-signed a letter warning about the dangers of uncontrolled AI, potentially threatening all human life.

But now he presented a more moderate view. Altman said artificial general intelligence (AGI) – a term for AI systems that can perform any intellectual task that a human can – is likely to emerge soon.

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“It [AGI] will change the world much less than we all think, and it will change jobs much less than we all think," he said. He also suggested that the development of AGI might happen in the not-too-distant future. 

Rising concerns about AI development 

In May of last year, A group of engineers and CEOs issued a new warning about the existential threat they believe AI poses to humanity.

Notably, the signatories included Sam Altman, along with prominent figures from various industries such as Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Alvin Wang Graylin, President of HTC China, Lila Ibrahim, COO of Google DeepMind, Mira Murati, CTO of OpenAI, Ted Lieu from Congress, Ilya Sutskever, Chief Scientist of OpenAI, and Jianyi Zhang from Beijing's Institute, among several others.

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