Sam Altman argues AGI won't be a single superintelligence but distributed across society as shared tools and systems that amplify human productivity. He sees two roles: individual productivity tools and components of larger emergent systems that boost collective capabilities across institutions.
AGI gets built or like how do you conceptualize the positive version of this? And, and my answer to that has like evolved quite a bit over time. But I'll give you my current thinking and I'm sure it'll change more. Well, I shall start with my original conception. My original conception was at some point we like get over the threshold to this like self improving superintelligence and it's this magic thing in the tower that we can like ask any question and it answers it. And it's like constantly off figuring out how to improve the world and maybe it's like sharing with us some UBI or something like that. And it's sort of at once like very utopic and extremely dystopic. But it did seem to me like where we were heading with the way things are developing now, which I think for a bunch of reasons which maybe we can get into a weird plan is like 99th or 90th percentile good of all the scenarios I can imagine. What I think it looks like is AGI just sort of participates in society and in the economy either mostly by being tools to make individual people more productive, but also in this other way which I'll talk about, and that is that society is this like emergent, very complex phenomenon of creating tremendous shared intelligence in building blocks of technology. This like scaffolding that exists between all of us. You know, somebody contributes one insight about material science that lets someone else discover new physics, lets another group discover another piece of material science, and that leads to another group developing the transistor and we skip a bunch of steps and society comes up with good institutions and eventually you get those iPhones you all are holding, and you all holding those iPhones are dramatically more capable than your great great great grandparents, even though the genetic dirt is almost nothing. And so the super intelligence is not what exists in any one neural network, not yours, not in the AIs, but in this scaffolding between the neural networks. And, and so like the AGI is not, is not the neural, it's not what exists in our, any one data center or in any one copy of the AI, but it's, it's this like vast production and accumulation of intelligence in the technology tree that lets us, or us assisted by an AI or even a fairly autonomous system, accomplish things well outside of the information and processing power of a single neural network. And that's kind of where I think things are going to head. Certainly I hope things head. And it's a very different, I think, conception of what the arrival of AGI looks like and way more navigable, human compatible, whatever you want to call it. Then why is you think about it. What do you think people are getting?
