OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warns "the world is not prepared" as OpenAI accelerates research using its own AI

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes artificial general intelligence (AGI) is close and even superintelligence "not that far off," suggesting that OpenAI is accelerating its own research with AI.

In an interview at the Express Adda event, he said the technology OpenAI is already using internally is speeding up development so much that AGI is "pretty close" (41:07). Superintelligence is also "not that far off" (41:53). "It's going to be a faster takeoff than I originally thought and that is stressful and anxiety-inducing," Altman said (38:45).

Altman suggested that OpenAI already has models that go beyond what's publicly available. "We're going to have extremely capable models soon," he said. From the labs' perspective, "the world is not prepared" for what's coming. OpenAI recently said that its new coding model Codex 5.3 was co-developed by the model itself.

Altman also talked about the future of work. "The way I learned to write software is now effectively completely irrelevant." There will still be software developers, he said, but "writing, you know, C++ code by hand, that's over" (54:34). "Big categories of jobs AI is just going to completely obsolete," while others will barely be affected (54:52).

He pointed to graphic designers as an example: simple commissioned work like birthday invitations could easily be replaced by AI, but "the price of AI generated art is a zero and the price of human generated graphic art has continued to go up since this has happened" (55:26).