Artificial intelligence may soon surpass humans to create a ‘country’ of superintelligent geniuses housed within data centres. The warning — straight out of a dystopian science fiction novel — came from multiple tech CEOs on Thursday amidst the India AI Summit in Delhi. Both Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and his OpenAI ‘rival’ Sam Altman insisted that the world would soon have AI agents that operated at a level beyond human imagination.
“We’re increasingly close to what I’ve called a country of geniuses in a data centre. A set of AI agents that are more capable than most humans at most things and can coordinate at superhuman speed. That level of capability is something the world has never seen before and brings a very wide range of both opportunities and concerns for humanity,” Amodei told the India AI Summit.
Altman sounds ‘superintelligence’ warning – ‘By end of 2028…’
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also issued a similar warning during the event — predicting that AI could surpass human intellectual capacity by 2028. He painted a somewhat dystopian picture where vast intelligence is housed in data centres and stressed the need for ‘democratisation’ of AI to make humanity flourish.
“By the end of 2028, more of the world’s intellectual capacity could reside inside data centers than outside them…A superintelligence, at some point on its development curve, would be capable of doing a better job as CEO of a major company than any executive could, or certainly doing better research than our best scientists,” he said.
Altman also warned in conversation with PTI that concentration of all AI power in the hands of one company or country (even in the name of safety) would be a “disastrously bad” thing to do. He noted that some people wanted “effective totalitarianism in exchange for cancer cure” — opining that this trade-off should not be accepted.
“I do share the concern about concentration of AI. Our stance is that the only path forward is to heavily democratise AI and to put these tools in the hands of people, even if it comes with some downsides, even if it means that society has got to wrestle with some big challenges,” he said at a select briefing on the sidelines of the AI Summit.