Sam Altman is the CEO of the most visible artificial intelligence (AI) organization on the planet, OpenAI, the purveyors of the popular ChatGPT AI interface. His job is to keep the investment dollars flowing into OpenAI, tens of billions of them. So, it's pretty important for Altman to keep investors interested and to promise them breakthroughs...and also, apparently, to reschedule those breakthroughs when they don't occur.
Now, something that most people don't understand about OpenAI is that despite being recently valued at $500 billion, OpenAI loses money, reportedly $5 billion last year on sales of $3.7 billion. Back in 2023 Altman was telling the public that OpenAI had achieved artificial general intelligence (AGI). For those who don't know, AGI means intelligence capable of learning and executing all the tasks that humans can do. No one appears to know how exactly to measure whether a machine can do the totality of things a human can do, but it sounds very cool to talk about it. And, it's the kind of talk that keeps investors excited. The implication, of course, is that the investor class won't have to put up with pesky employees much longer for most jobs.
The moment when this happens, when machines become smarter than humans and start running everything for us —as if they don't already—is sometimes called the singularity, usually with a capital "S." Now, singularity has a specific meaning in physics. In this context it refers to a nonreligious, tech version of the rapture in which technological advancement becomes very rapid as machines take over and iterate on technical innovation. We know what happens to people in the religious version of the rapture—some ascend to heaven and others are left behind. But we aren't exactly sure what is to become of humans after the so-called singularity version of the rapture since supposedly there won't be much work to do. AI will be doing it.
