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In his 2005 book “The Singularity is Near,” the futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that the Singularity — the moment in which machine intelligence surpasses our own — would occur around the year 2045. Sam Altman believes it’s much closer.
In a blog post published Tuesday, the OpenAI CEO delivered a homily devoted to what he views as the imminent arrival of artificial “superintelligence.” Whereas artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is usually defined as a computer system able to match or outperform humans on any cognitive task, a superintelligent AI would go much further, overshadowing our own intelligence to such a vast degree that we’d be helpless to fathom it, like snails trying to understand general relativity.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
Crucially, the blog post frames this supposedly inevitable arrival of superintelligent AI as one that will happen gradually enough for society to prepare itself. By comparison, he looks back at the past five years, a relatively short period of time in which most people have gone from knowing nothing about AI to using powerful tools like ChatGPT on a daily basis, to the point where generative AI has become almost mundane.
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“Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be,” Altman wrote.
His writing veers at times into quasi-religious territory, portraying the arrival of superintelligent AI in terms reminiscent of early Christian prophets describing the Second Coming. While his language is cloaked in scientific, secular language, it’s hard not to detect just a hint of proselytizing: “the 2030s are likely going to be wildly different from any time that has come before,” he writes. “We do not know how far beyond human-level intelligence we can go, but we are about to find out.”
AGI — and by extension, artificial superintelligence — has been a divisive subject in the tech world. Like Altman, many believe its arrival is not a matter of if, but when. Meta is reportedly preparing to launch an internal research lab devoted to building superintelligence. Others doubt that it’s even technically possible to build a machine that’s more advanced than the human brain.
OpenAI catapulted to global fame following its release of ChatGPT in late 2022. The company, since then, has been shipping new AI products at a breakneck pace, prompting a steady trickle of employees to depart, citing concerns that safety was being deprioritized in the name of speed. Many have joined Anthropic, an AI company that was actually founded by former OpenAI employees, or have gone on to launch their own ventures. Ilya Sutskever, for example — a cofounder of OpenAI and its former chief scientist — founded a company called Safe Superintelligence (SSI) last June.
AI developers in general have also been widely criticized for their rush to automate human labor without offering any kind of concrete policy proposals for what millions of job-displaced people in the future ought to do with themselves. Altman’s new blog post echoes a refrain that’s become common among tech leaders on this front: Yes, there will be some job losses, but ultimately the technology will create entirely new categories of jobs to replace those that have been automated; and besides, AI is going to generate so much wealth for humanity at large that people will have the freedom to pursue more meaningful things than work. (Just exactly what those things are is never made quite clear.) Altman has also supported the idea of implementing a universal basic income to support the masses as the world adjusts to his vision of a techno-utopia.
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“The rate of technological progress will keep accelerating, and it will continue to be the case that people are capable of adapting to almost anything,” he wrote in the blog post. “There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before.”
OpenAI has evolved quickly and dramatically since it was founded a decade ago. It began as a nonprofit, aimed — as its name suggests — at open-source AI research. It’s since become a profit-raising behemoth competing with the likes of Google and Meta. The company’s mission statement has long been “to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”
Now, judging from Altman’s blog post, OpenAI seems to be aiming for an even loftier goal: “before anything else, we are a superintelligence research company.”
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