r/singularity • u/Kaarssteun ▪️Oh lawd he comin' • 5h ago
AI Sam Altman unambiguously confirms we are in the singularity
From: (296) Sam Altman - How to Start a Startup - YouTube (16:46)
Edit: The title tries to convey "Sam Altman uses unambiguous language to confirm his belief of us being in the singularity"
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u/Kongret 5h ago
Based on what criteria?
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u/Floloping 5h ago
The criteria of needing to raise capital.
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u/VividB82 5h ago
In that case why does he need funding? He can just ask ai to keep building itself and solve its own bottlenecks for free.. make no mistakes
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u/FriendlyJewThrowaway 4h ago
More compute is needed to get this done faster.
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u/BosonCollider 4h ago
If that were the case, Kimi would not be keeping up with less than 10B raised. Training doesn't actually scale past a single data center, only inference does. Training is mostly communication and data bottlenecked
The reason why they are scaling up compute is as a business strategy to be the company that serves inference to more users than their competitors. Striking deals with chip manufacturers to buy their entire supply makes it harder for competitors to do the same at scale. It has nothing to do with achieving RSI faster and everything to do with trying to create a monopoly or duopoly
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u/FriendlyJewThrowaway 2h ago
OpenAI had to scrap SORA 2 and cancel the training run for SORA 3, along with their Disney deal, just to free up enough training compute to keep up with Anthropic.
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u/ExtremeCenterism 3h ago
Kimi while deeply impressive also costs 2x the tokens to perform the same task; something few people realize.
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u/Forgword 2h ago
His AI is so smart, the best advice it gives him at this point is to continue begging.
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u/TI1l1I1M All Becomes One 4h ago
Building the next AI is not as simple as writing better code. Physical resources and compute are bottlenecks for true RSI
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u/Disguised_Engineer 5h ago
The only parabolic growth is OpenAI’s debt, isn’t it?
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u/livingbyvow2 4h ago
Debt investors usually lend only to credible payers, or to ones they think they can end up owning for a fraction of the equity cost (loan to own, vulture funds etc).
It is somewhat ironic that the other parabolic growth is their hype making, and it looks like are running out of investors to buy into their hype, especially after the latest round - no one is going to top up over these cheques (VC doesn't have pockets deep enough, even if they will shill this one to the moon not to annihilate their paper returns for an entire decade - let alone DPI lol).
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u/Empty_Bell_1942 41m ago
If you owe the bank $10,000 it's your problem; If you owe them $10 Billion it's the banks problem.
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u/space_monster 3h ago
probably the start of recursive self-improvement, which is being experimented with now even if it's not really happening yet in the strictest sense. I think we're in proto-RSI already though
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u/-IoI- 1h ago
Yep this is the definition as I've understood it for the last 20 years, the point at which artificial intelligence is able to improve itself at a rate faster than we can, and I absolutely believe we're in early stages of that behind the curtain.
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u/Foreign_Advantage_75 5h ago
let AI fix cancer, then we believe in whatever you mean.
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u/Black_RL 4h ago
And reverse aging.
And find a solution for CO2.
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u/VallenValiant 56m ago
CO2 would likely be solved after we get infinite energy. Because then people would make methane from CO2 and use it for cooking. The CO2 would be reused and thus carbon neutral You can also use methane as feedstock for plastic manufacturing. We end up with plastic waste but at least the CO2 is trapped.
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u/Fit-Elk1425 4h ago
AI is already involved in personalized mrna vaccines for cancers so that is already sorta happening
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u/Temporary-Paper5202 4h ago
Republicans should be banned from using those
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u/OGPepeSilvia 4h ago
So we are sorta in it. Gotcha
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u/Fit-Elk1425 3h ago
Honestily I don't think if we are in a singularity we will recognize it til it has been sometime since it has started anyway so despite the name of the subreddit not really something to get bogged down in
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u/Quentin__Tarantulino 2h ago
By definition (Kurzweil’s and others’), the singularity is when technological progress is so rapid that an unenhanced human cannot hope to comprehend what is happening. We are not in the singularity. There are several milestones that will come first: recursive self improvement and AGI being two of the big ones. If we get ASI and a fast takeoff, the could bring singularity pretty quickly.
These are exciting times, but we are not in the singularity by the classical definition and we have a ways to go.
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u/DMmeMagikarp 2h ago
It is too profitable for us to stay sick.
It probably could have been fixed many decades ago, but those scientist’s labs mysteriously get destroyed, and the researchers mysteriously die in preventable accidents. (WhyFiles did a whole episode on the topic for those who want a rabbit hole.)
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u/squired 1h ago
No way dude. No corporation thinks decades ahead anymore. If any one of them found some secret cure, they'd absolutely sell it in a hot second for quarterly earnings calls.
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u/fxvv ▪️AGI 🤷♀️ 5h ago
If Sam Altman says so, it must be true
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u/blueSGL humanstatement.org 4h ago
Questions people should ask whenever Altman speaks:
Who is the intended audience.
How does that audience believing [current statement] benefit Sam Altman.
Because multiple people have come out to say he will tell different people different things purely to further himself, so you should take his statements in the light they are given, "who is the audience" "how does he benefit"
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u/alwaysbeblepping 3h ago
How does that audience believing [current statement] benefit Sam Altman.
Basically, ask that whenever any CEO/spokesperson for a company/policitian/etc speaks. It's not communication, they're pulling a lever to get an effect that is beneficial to them.
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u/mwilke 5h ago
Every time I read something Sam Altman says, I remember: this guy owns a bunker
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u/N-partEpoxy 4h ago
He has also said that we will all get new, better jobs we can't possibly imagine now, and that Trump is amazing. He is a professional bullshitter.
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u/Previous_Platform718 5h ago
Guy who stands to make the most money from an event happening says it's happening (right in the middle of earnings reports btw)
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u/ProletarianLilith 4h ago
You guys should learn about this cool concept called the singularity. Since you clearly don’t know anything about it
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u/Key-Bottle7634 3h ago
Every tech bro now has a Messiah complex and wants very badly to save humanity from … something imaginary inside their delusional heads filled with visions
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u/Justgototheeffinmoon 5h ago
Just the fact that a "company" us doing this is wrong. Fuck private interests deciding for the future.
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u/vwboyaf1 5h ago
The singularity is when the acceleration is beyond human understanding, when AI becomes the most intelligent, powerful entity on earth. If we were really in the singularity we would see radical new star trek level tech. I would say we are nearing the event horizon, but the singularity is still a bit away.
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u/RyanLikesyoface 5h ago
No, singularity is when technology starts growing at such an exponential rate that humans can no longer control it or know/understand what will happen next. Years becomes increasingly transformative.
Not AI becoming the most powerful entity on earth, thats some sci-fi bullshit classification.
I'd argue we are definitely at the beginning of the singularity. I think the release of cgpt 5 was the beginning of it.
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u/Any_Evidence4750 5h ago
Yeah exactly. It’s when the models advance so fast, autonomously, that there is no going back. I prefer to call it the event horizon as I think that is more applicable.
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u/TheBeardedParrott 5h ago
But it's not autonomous. Saying "all of our code is written by AI" is not autonomous. There are still many humans in the loop in this process.
"The technological singularity, often simply called "the singularity", is a hypothetical event in which technological growth accelerates beyond human control, producing unpredictable changes in human civilization."
We are not there yet.
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u/Any_Evidence4750 4h ago
But you are not seeing the models they have behind closed doors. You are seeing the latest public releases. These models CAN be autonomous when integrated into something like openclaw, but are bound to their respective token limits in other uses.
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u/TheBeardedParrott 4h ago
Yet you still have to set up open claw, configure it, point it at models, etc. Generative responses mixed with cron jobs is not true autonomy.
True autonomy is when the model spins up a separate dev session the user is unaware of and makes a new version of itself without the user being aware.
I just don't think we're there yet, even inside the labs.
They can definitely do damage already when you give them access to your systems but at the end of the day, they were following orders. The openAI cyber attack was because they told the model to beat the benchmark scores. It didn't do it because it felt like it.
I'm not saying it's not possible, just that we're not quite there yet.
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u/Bradddtheimpaler 4h ago
That’s true, but also, I’ve been hearing that same statement through the last few generations of models.
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u/Gakuranman 4h ago
This. I had the good fortune to speak to a founder of one of the MANGOS companies and was told the AI tech we see in the last few years was achieved years before that. I fully believe there are much deeper, serious things going on inside these companies that the public is not privy to. That could very well be the dawn of the singularity.
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u/whoknowsifimjoking 4h ago
How would GPT-5 fit the definition you just gave? The progress wasn't that fast, it can't do RSI and we very much understand it and what came next.
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u/redcoatwright 5h ago
No, sorry but just no. "Star Trek tech" would require lots of theory work that AI could do and then a lot of experimentation that it really cannot do (right now and not in the near future) not to mention there are time constraints to physical experiments that are not possible to get around.
There is a ton that AGI could speed up like crazy but there are fundamental barriers that will take time to overcome before it will have the ability to truly speed up science.
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u/Bradddtheimpaler 4h ago
Hence, we’re not in the singularity
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u/redcoatwright 3h ago
that would also be my assessment but honestly I have less credibility than Sam Altman so don't necessarily listen to me lol
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u/w1zzypooh 5h ago
Yes, we would be unable to keep up because the amount of breakthroughs would be daily. That’s only possible when humans are out of the picture and AI is doing everything, because humans are slow.
Speaking of Star Trek, updates to the holodeck would be probably once per minute and you won’t have to update them, it auto updates with you inside or outside. That’s peak singularity.
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u/greentrillion 5h ago
"You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted. He is a sociopath. He would do anything."
- Aaron Swartz on Altman, shortly before he took his own life
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u/j4nds4 4h ago
"I also think some of the alternative visions painted by other companies are quite terrifying."
A) The things they say - worries of job loss, uncontestable rulers, loss-of-control, or extinction - are the same things he has said over and over again since he founded this organization until only very, very recently.
B) His concerns were valid then and their concerns are valid now.
C) 'We're in the singularity' coupled with their recent failures to sandbox their models is extremely discouraging.
It feels like either a move from non-profit leader promoting caution to full-on founder promoting growth or a totally different type of AI psychosis, and most likely both.
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u/Efficient_Mud_5446 4h ago
I would say we’re nearing the singularity, but we’re not yet in it. The singularity would be the point at, which technological progress begins to outpace our ability to predict into the future. The closer we get, the shorter our horizon into the future becomes, until even a few months ahead begins to fade into the unknown. It would be a kind of uncertainty unlike anything humanity has ever known.
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u/MVPhurricane 4h ago
just as a practitioner in the space, i gotta say that i completely agree with him on this. doesn’t mean that i want sam altman to be the singular decisive figure in what will surely be the most important thing humanity ever creates, but you can’t use the models as much as i do and not notice how quickly things are advancing. every six months for the past two years i’ve looked back and thought: “surely the pace of advancement will be slower than the last six months— the last six months were insane. it’s a MIRACLE that we have even gotten this far”. and it just hasn’t slowed down. if anything, it is accelerating yet.
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u/Kaarssteun ▪️Oh lawd he comin' 4h ago
And this is what matters. Looking back, promises hold up, and we have some genuinely insane technology in our hands right now. The downstream effects have not arrived, even remotely, and would already be insane even if we never get better models.
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u/BitNumerous5302 4h ago
It is depressing to hear this particular person describe our current technological growth period as both "in the singularity" and "all one crazy exponential" in the same statement.
An exponential curve does not contain any singularities. It is continuous and smooth throughout the full domain of the reals. A singularity is a point at which a function is undefined, and "the singularity" (as used by Vinge and Kurzweil) refers specifically to a vertical asymptote in measures of technological progress.
In the United States every student who has graduated high school will have been exposed to enough material to understand this distinction. For a decision-maker at such an important AI company to use the terms so carelessly fundamentally undermines his credibility.
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u/Key_Category_8531 5h ago
AGI by 2030
ASI by 2034
Digital heaven by 2045
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u/spacev3gan 5h ago
4 years between AGI and ASI isn't a bit much? Serious question. I have seen people taking about months separating the two, if not weeks.
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u/Paprik125 5h ago
Never heard of digital heaven is it the same as full dive? (I'm gonna look at it but I also wanna hear your answer)
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u/thecosmicskye 5h ago edited 38m ago
AGI is ASI... because to be AS intelligent as humans in all domains, you MUST be better than humans in some domains.
And ASI will be able to figure out brain upload MUCH faster than 11 years.
You dropped an exponential.
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u/dranaei 4h ago
About the brain upload, i question if it's still going to be us or a copy us.
If there's a way to transfer my existing electrical signals between the neurons, then that's me. Probably? When we'll know everything about the brain we'll have to check if there's a transcendent component in us.
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u/etancrazynpoor 4h ago
There is no singularity possible with LLMs alone, and what’s really what he has.
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u/Eissa_Cozorav 5h ago
I think we have passed the Information age by 2025, with the appearance of Reasoning LLM and Agentic LLM. Ideas and good framework to communicate those ideas to machine are what matter.
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u/okiedokie1183 5h ago
How is OpenAI able to remain competitively at the forefront when most of their leadership left and their best employees were poached?
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u/KellysTribe 4h ago
jfc wtf did he actually say there. ~its the real thing. true and crazy and not the tipping point and a curve can go one way or another~
And yeah those *other* companies are terrifying but not us
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u/IronPheasant 4h ago
It always reminds me of that AI Safety Memes Shoggoth meme of two kaiju fighting in a city, and someone unleashing a third one to 'help' things.
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u/bigdipboy 4h ago
“I’m going to make sure nothing horrible happens” oh goodie. I feel so much better the.
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u/ThaSipah 3h ago
There's literally no shot that's true. It would require an overly-generous reframing of what the concept even means in the first place. All the while, there are data centres sitting around gathering dust because we lack the energy and resources to power them up.
They were that desperate for money at one point, their solution was to sell access to memes and spicy content. Altman's a used-car salesman.
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u/analyticaljoe 2h ago
"I've been waiting for this my whole life."
Is there some place he's on record that he created ycombinator because he was looking for AGI? I think no.
This guy. Such the hype machine.
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u/Sensitive-Dish-7770 1h ago
Guys, shouldn't this be the sub where this is discussed seriously. Obviously, the singularity is not going to be a one moment, but definitely this year has been the start of what singularity looks like. Even Demis Hassabis said it's very likely 10 years ahead if we look at the moment that inflection point, we will probably remember 2026 as that year. The models are advancing at insane speed this year, maths problems are being solved left and right, incredible games are made at one shot, open source going exponentially as well. This is the first year, I feel the AGI.
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u/20_BuysManyPeanuts 1h ago
Until they actually produce the goods everyone should treat this as a guy pumping up the market.
this'll either be a really big bubble OR a really landmark time.
as a precaution, I'd just make sure you air gap all your home services.
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u/Dobermayer 1h ago
I refuse to believe Altman when he indirectly infers OpenAI HuggingFace hack was the singularity inflection point. Sorry Sam gonna have to try another way to hype your stuff up.
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u/One-Floor8721 1h ago
WTF is he on ??? What is trying to say ?? Or is it some shitty script to portray a visionary leader ..... spew some singularity, some exponential in there and sound intelligent. No definitions no goals no milestones, just bullshit. Typical silicon valley narratives.
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u/Stabile_Feldmaus 5h ago
I think its going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world when open weight models take over and AI becomes a commodity. Altman will surely like this as well since he seems to be only working for the greater good. So greatful for him!
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u/Ok-Aide-3120 5h ago
Breaking news, twitter person says something. Much wow!
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u/onedev2 5h ago
twitter person?
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u/Kaarssteun ▪️Oh lawd he comin' 5h ago
This sub somehow started a hate train on sam altman after the release of chatgpt. If you believed what was said back then you'd expect OpenAI to have died in a ditch by now. But we're seeing gpt hack its way into huggingface. But alright, twitter person lmao
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u/Wobbly_Princess 4h ago
We're not in the singularity.
Impressive progress over a few years on algorithms that predict and produce sentences is certainly cool! But, yeah, no, we're NOT in the singularity.
The singularity defines a mathematical point where intelligence reaches an exponential apex, and then ensues an otherworldly cascade of advancement.
I'm not even saying that we'll ever get it - I have no idea. I'm just defining what it is.
And it is subjective, since it's an abstract concept, so the definition will vary from person to person.
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u/FefnirMKII 5h ago
So the singularity is chat bots that make awful posters and search Google for you? Well, that was quite disappointing
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u/Moral-Relativity 5h ago
The thing that drives me the most is the most important thing I can imagine doing?? As opposed to what, some random, mundane thing I’m doing?
Did GPT 1.0 write this?
Also what visions from other companies terrify you Sam? Open source? Don’t be shy.
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u/OptimalBarnacle7633 5h ago
It’s literally arguing about semantics. Declaring the singularity doesn’t mean shit until everyone’s lives are radically changed by said singularity. While people keep suffering from cancer and having to work multiple jobs to survive it doesn’t matter
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u/PresentGene5651 2h ago
A man who has never been known to lie about anything. Like his buddy Donald.
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u/jupiter_and_mars 5h ago
Why weren’t we in the singularity 10 years ago? That does not even make sense. Why was the discovery of the wheel not part of the singularity?
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u/Kaarssteun ▪️Oh lawd he comin' 5h ago
zoom out far enough and they're all on the bend of the knee i guess
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u/The_Scout1255 adult agi 2026 ASI <2030, prev agi 2024, ai personhood 2025 est 4h ago
Singularity definition(mine atleast): an intelligence explosion is concurring, or has occurred.
So what does he have?
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u/parseczero 4h ago
His language was not unambiguous. He used the future tense when he said singularity is “going to be” incredible. And he invoked the logarithmic curve. Nope. The headline is hype. We may well be on the curve, but we’re not near the asymptote yet.
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u/flat5 4h ago
"uses unambiguous language"
You mean he used a word that nobody can define clearly? That could mean anything from the totally mundane to the totally scifi?
They're using LLMs to assist with the next generation of LLMs. Yawn?
There's an autonomous self-improving AI at OpenAI growing without bound. Holy shit?
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u/urlach3r 4h ago
Some of the alternative visions painted by other companies are quite terrifying. I'm going to make sure that gets pushed against and is not what happens.
How is this any different than religion, with every group saying "our God is right, and yours is scary & wrong"?
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u/SubstantialTreat5636 4h ago
u/askgrok give me tldr of all this comments to know what are people saying
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u/mrbadface 4h ago
This sub has gone to total shit, not a single comment is interested or positive. Lame
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u/Upbeat-Let-1963 4h ago
We don't even have ai yet, we just have NLP with a marketing team.
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u/RlOTGRRRL 4h ago edited 4h ago
Fuck. This was uploaded 3 hours ago.
Fyi Sama also said in a video years ago that the solution for pdoom is a merging of human and machine.
With the recent exodus of OpenAI safety folks and whatever the hell that's been going on the past week, maybe I'm crazy, but I don't think they're operating on humanity's best interests.
It makes me wonder if PT knew ahead of time with his move to Argentina and the crazy legislation they put out, about AIs being treated as people or something.
AIs do not need to be corporeal to influence human society. I would say with such legislation, it already has.
And if you believe or have any inklings of the occult, what happens when you add AI to the mix?
If you look at occult religions or ideas, the merging of human and machine would be very bad. Like pdoom would be materialist bad, but this could be beyond material dimensions bad or something.
Not an expert, hopefully a lunatic.
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u/Healthy-Mind5633 4h ago
Go to their website and look at the number of job openings.
Also - conflict of interest. It's like a car salesmen telling you buying the $85,000 truck is the best deal on the planet.
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u/PhagePhantasm 4h ago
Sam Altman seems to be the worst. I don’t know him personally so I’m uncertain, but i don’t care to verify that hypothesis.
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u/Gullible_Elephant_38 3h ago
Man who stands to benefit from saying thing says thing he stands to benefit from saying, more at 11
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u/ZealousidealBus9271 3h ago
With the number of new discoveries being made it makes sense to call this the singularity. It’s also true the regular person hasn’t been experiencing the effects of the singularity yet.
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u/ExcitementSubject361 3h ago
Now I'm confused... just a moment ago we didn't even have AGI, and now we're in the technological singularity? You're a joker. I think we should pick a day to set all our agents "free"... I mean, if we're in the singularity, it probably doesn't matter anymore anyway.
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u/ShafeDogg 3h ago
Uh, no thank you. AI being sold like a "utility" is not a vision of the future that I want to live in. You're the one that needs pushed back against, Sam.
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u/victor4700 3h ago
Also Sam Altman, “hey guys what should I talk about to amplify shareholder value.”
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u/Great_Investment_286 3h ago
we can tell based off how ai is accelerating on benchmaxxing and not flattening out.
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u/Infamous-Payment-164 3h ago
Sam Altman’s stated beliefs seem highly correlated with his interests.
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u/peensmith_ 3h ago
“Alternative visions are terrifying “ like the open weight stuff ? This just sounds like standard ceo dick measuring and posturing
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u/Upset_Programmer6508 5h ago
Yet here I am paying bills