OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claims artificial intelligence (AI) has reached singularity after his technology carried out an autonomous cyberattack for the first time ever.
Technological singularity occurs when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence by a significant margin, begins to develop its own code and intelligence more quickly and effectively than any human can, and becomes unpredictable and uncontrollable.
Altman made his remarks a few days after OpenAI disclosed what it called an unprecedented autonomous AI cyberattack. Hugging Face, another tech company, was the target of a self-directed hack by its AI models during testing of their capabilities.
“We’re now, like, in the singularity. Now we’re actually in the moment that we used to talk about at the lunch table in a very not-serious way,” Altman said on the Relentless podcast, adding, “I’ve been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it’s going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world.”
If Sam Altman is correct, what does it mean?
Sam Altman’s claim of his artificial intelligence system achieving singularity begs two questions. The first is, did it really? The second is, if it did, is that really a good thing?
Sean O hEigeartaigh, research professor at the University of Cambridge and director of the AI: Futures and Responsibility Programme at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, told Al Jazeera that he does not believe that AI has reached the “singularity.”
“By the definition I’m familiar with, the singularity is the hypothetical point where AI is so capable and advancing so fast that it is transforming civilization in ways we cannot control or predict,” he said. “This would most likely be through AI rapidly designing future generations of AI: recursive self-improvement. We aren’t there yet.”
The second question may have already been answered many times over
In 2023, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates warned that “there’s the possibility that AIs will run out of control.”
“Could a machine decide that humans are a threat, conclude that its interests are different from ours, or simply stop caring about us? Possibly,” he wrote.
In 2021, Mo Gawdat, the former Chief Business Officer with Google’s Research and Development division, warned that artificial intelligence researchers are “creating God.”
In 2022, researchers at Google Deepmind and the University of Oxford said AI will “likely” eliminate humanity. Also in 2022, a third of artificial intelligence scientists said they believe artificial intelligence could cause a nuclear-level catastrophe.
And around the same time as Bill Gates’ warning, more than 1,100 technologists, engineers, and artificial intelligence ethicists signed an open letter asking artificial intelligence labs to halt their development of advanced AI systems.
“Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable,” the letter read.
Of course, as with the other warnings, almost no one listened. And here we are today.