OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has warned that AI will not only automate scientific progress but also the ‘whole economy’. Altman, speaking at IIT Delhi in a chat with renowned venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, also offered crucial advice to students in an AI-led era.
While answering a question on what India would look like in 2047 when the country completes 100 years of independence, Altman said that the first thing will be that the coming generation will have ‘superintelligence’ at their fingertips, which would mean that his one-year-old would never ‘know a world where he was smarter than a computer ever’.
“Education is clearly going to totally change. Healthcare is clearly totally going to change. What it means to do work is going to totally change. Companies may be a few people and a giant data center and build incredible new kinds of value,” Altman said.
“The top-level driver of the economy and of life getting better and better every year is scientific discovery. And then the second most important thing is the economic engine around that that brings these new capabilities out into the world. And both of those are going to get automated at the same time,” he added.
“We’re going to automate scientific progress. We’re going to automate the whole economy,” Altman further added.
Sam Altman’s advice to students:
Altman then told the students that by the time the current batch of first-year students graduates, they will not know any technical field better than AI.
“You may understand better what people want. You may understand much better how to interact with people, motivate them, how to come up with creative ideas, adapt quickly, and create value,” Altman said.
Asked what advice he would give to a college student today, Altman said, “I can’t emphasise enough how important I think it is to stay on the forefront of the tools. I expect that to be a compounding accelerant. So build projects all the time, just figure out what’s going to be possible, and it’s going to rapidly increase every couple of months from now on. That really matters.”
“The class that I wish my college had offered — the motto of Y Combinator is ‘make something people want’, and it has, I think, for 20 years now, been the best motto of any investor. And I wish my school had offered a class on that, because I think that is a learnable skill, figuring that out,” he added.
