Sam Altman expects first AI workers this year; OpenAI closer to AGI

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the first artificial intelligence agents might enter the workforce this year as his company inches closer to developing humanlike artificial general intelligence (AGI). “We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies,” said Altman in a blog post titled “Reflections” on Jan. 6. AI agents or agentic AI refers to artificial intelligence systems that exhibit autonomous decision-making and goal-directed behavior. They can autonomously understand complex goals, make decisions, take actions with minimal human intervention and execute multi-step reasoning processes.Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is also confident that AI agents will become mainstream. “We’re starting to see enterprise adoption of agentic AI really is the latest rage,” he said at the firm’s earnings call in November. Meanwhile, Altman said that OpenAI can design and build artificial general intelligence, which brings AI incrementally closer to providing humanlike intelligence.“We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it,”Altman said he believes that “iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly distributed outcomes.” He added that they’re now beginning to aim beyond “to superintelligence in the true sense of the word.”“Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity,” he said. The launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot marked an unexpected tipping point for the AI revolution, which many have predicted will boom in 2025. “We are finally seeing some of the massive upsides we have always hoped for from AI, and we can see how much more will come soon,” he said. In November, Dario Amodei, CEO of AI firm Anthropic, which created the Claude chatbot, said that human-level AI could be here as early as 2026.Magazine: A bizarre cult is growing around AI-created memecoin ‘religions’: AI Eye