Sam Altman, the Chief Executive Officer of ChatGPT promoter OpenAI, has proposed three laws to define the future of AI. In a blog post on Monday, he said the intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it.
“These resources are chiefly training compute, data, and inference compute. It appears that you can spend arbitrary amounts of money and get continuous and predictable gains; the scaling laws that predict this are accurate over many orders of magnitude,” he said.
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He said the cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10 times every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use.
“You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger,” he said.
He said the socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. “A consequence of this is that we see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in the near future,” he observed.
“If these three observations continue to hold true, the impacts on society will be significant,” he felt.
Virtual Co-Workers
Altman announced the launch of AI agents, which will eventually feel like virtual co-workers.
He cited the example of a software engineering agent, who eventually be capable of doing most things a software engineer at a top company with a few years of experience could do.
“It will not have the biggest new ideas. It will require lots of human supervision and direction. and it will be great at some things but surprisingly bad at others,” he points out.
He, then, explains the scope of such agents spanning the length and breadth of the IT development.
“Imagine it as a real-but-relatively-junior virtual coworker. Now imagine 1,000 of them. Or one million of them. Now imagine such agents in every field of knowledge work,” he said.
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He, however, is cautious while talking about the impact. He said the world will not change all at once. “It never does. Life will go on mostly the same in the short run, and people in 2025 will mostly spend their time in the same way they did in 2024. We will still fall in love, create families, get in fights online, hike in nature, etc,” he said.
“But the future will be coming at us in a way that is impossible to ignore, and the long-term changes to our society and economy will be huge. We will find new things to do, new ways to be useful to each other, and new ways to compete, but they may not look very much like the jobs of today,” he said.