During the early Asian hours on Monday, January 6, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted his documented reflections on AI agents and AGI development.
Background
- According to Altman, the first AI agents could enter the workforce this year
- He also indicated that his company is inching closer to developing humanlike artificial general intelligence [AGI]
- AI agents are artificial intelligence systems that make autonomous decisions and execute independent actions directed toward particular goals
- The OpenAI executive believes that “iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly distributed outcomes”
- However, the company is now beginning to widen the horizons — “to superintelligence in the true sense of the word”
Why should you pay attention?
- AGI will directly put AI and humanlike intelligence in the same equation
- Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation — well beyond what humans are capable of doing on their own
- This, in turn, will help foster abundance and prosperity
- Altman, interestingly, chalked out his AGI vision back in 2019 itself
Who said what?
- In his blogpost Altman chalked out,
“We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies”
- With respect to AGI, he asserted,
“We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it”
The crypto x AI intersection
- Chalking out how the crypto sector will be a part of the equation, pseudonymous trader Defisquared said,
“Many of these agents with jobs are going to require financial autonomy to make transactions, investments, etc. and crypto is exactly what will enable these new economies. AI x Crypto is going to be wild this year”
- Other experiments are being carried out similarly, with Story Porotocol’s Jason Zhao claiming that its AI agent “materially changed” output
- Meanwhile, Syncracy Capital’s Co-Founder Ryan Watkins emphasized,
“Sam really might just bullpost our AI coins to Valhalla. Silly if you think there’s any bigger theme this cycle than decentralized AI”
- Most top AI tokens were trading in green at press time, with Akash Network’s AKT up 9.5%, RENDER and AI16Z up 3.6%, FET and AIOZ up 6.2%
Zooming out
- Fear, however, continues to linger in the background, with people outrightly threatened by bots taking over jobs and endangering their livelihood and existence
- Posts along the lines of “time is running fast,” “we ought to survive” have been doing the rounds on CT
- Altman, nevertheless, indicated that we’re “finally” seeing “massive upsides” we have always hoped for from AI
- He expects the prospects to further amplify in the months to come
