This is OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s favorite question about AGI

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is always in the media spotlight, fielding many questions.

In an interview at Harvard Business School earlier this year, which was just made public, venture capitalist Patrick Chung passed the proverbial mic back to Altman, asking him to share the one question he’d most like to be asked about artificial general intelligence. Since its inception in 2015, OpenAI has aimed to achieve this still hypothetical form of robot intelligence that mimics — or even surpasses — human abilities.

Altman offered two questions: What do you hope society looks like when AGI gets built and how do you conceptualize the positive version of this?

Altman said his answer to these questions has evolved.

“My original conception was, at some point, we like, get over the threshold to this self-improving superintelligence, and it’s this magic thing in the tower that we can ask any question, and it answers it, and it’s like constantly off figuring out how to improve the world,” he said. It would be, at once, “utopic and extremely dystopic.”

Now, though — or at least at the time of the interview in May — Altman said we’re headed to a world where AGI just “sort of participates in society and in the economy.”

For the most part, it will manifest in tools that make individuals more productive, he said. However, it’ll also facilitate the development of a body of “shared intelligence,” illustrating it with the metaphor of “scaffolding that exists between all of us.”

He said that one expert might contribute insight about material science to existing knowledge on the topic, which may help another group develop a transistor or a mini semiconductor.

He said that “superintelligence is not what exists in any one neural network.” Instead, it emerges “in this scaffolding between the neural networks” and forms a “technology tree” that enables society to achieve goals beyond the capabilities of any individual neural network.

Altman more recently said that his experience at Burning Man — which B-17 Rob Price described as an “annual campout-slash-rave-slash-art-exhibition-slash-ephemeral-city that blooms and disappears in the Black Rock Desert — helped him better envision this new frontier.

It showed him one part of “what the post-AGI world can look like,” Altman said on the Life in Seven Songs podcast. “Where people are just focused on doing stuff for each other, caring for each other, and making incredible gifts to give each other.”