In a brand new essay printed Tuesday referred to as “The Light Singularity,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared his newest imaginative and prescient for a way AI will change the human expertise over the following 15 years.
The essay is a basic instance of Altman’s futurism: hyping up the promise of AGI — and arguing that his firm is kind of near the feat — whereas concurrently downplaying its arrival. The OpenAI CEO continuously publishes essays of this nature, cleanly laying out a future during which AGI disrupts our trendy conception of labor, vitality, and the social contract. However typically, Altman’s essays include hints about what OpenAI is engaged on subsequent.
At one level within the essay, Altman claimed that subsequent 12 months, in 2026, the world will “doubtless see the arrival of (AI) techniques that may work out novel insights.” Whereas that is considerably obscure, OpenAI executives have just lately indicated that the corporate is concentrated on getting AI fashions to provide you with new, fascinating concepts concerning the world.
When saying OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini AI reasoning fashions in April, co-founder and President Greg Brockman mentioned these have been the primary fashions that scientists had used to generate new, useful concepts.
Altman’s weblog publish means that within the coming 12 months, OpenAI itself could ramp up its efforts to develop AI that may generate novel insights. OpenAI definitely wouldn’t be the one firm targeted on this effort — a number of of OpenAI’s opponents have shifted their focus to coaching AI fashions that may assist scientists provide you with new hypotheses, and thus, novel discoveries concerning the world.
In Might, Google launched a paper on AlphaEvolve, an AI coding agent that the corporate claims to have generated novel approaches to advanced math issues. One other startup backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, FutureHouse, claims its AI agent instrument has been able to making a real scientific discovery. In Might, Anthropic launched a program to assist scientific analysis.
If profitable, these firms may automate a key a part of the scientific course of, and probably break into large industries similar to drug discovery, materials science, and different fields with science at their core.
This wouldn’t be the primary time Altman has tipped his hat about OpenAI’s plans in a weblog. In January, Altman wrote one other weblog publish suggesting that 2025 could be the 12 months of brokers. His firm then proceeded to drop its first three AI brokers: Operator, Deep Analysis, and Codex.
However getting AI techniques to generate novel insights could also be more durable than making them agentic. The broader scientific group stays considerably skeptical of AI’s capability to generate genuinely authentic insights.
Earlier this 12 months, Hugging Face’s Chief Science Officer Thomas Wolf wrote an essay arguing that trendy AI techniques can’t ask nice questions, which is vital to any nice scientific breakthrough. Kenneth Stanley, a former OpenAI analysis lead, additionally beforehand instructed TechCrunch that at the moment’s AI fashions can’t generate novel hypotheses.
Stanley is now constructing out a workforce at Lila Sciences, a startup that raised $200 million to create an AI-powered laboratory particularly targeted on getting AI fashions to provide you with higher hypotheses. This can be a tough downside, in line with Stanley, as a result of it includes giving AI fashions a way for what’s artistic and fascinating.
Whether or not OpenAI really creates an AI mannequin that’s able to producing novel insights stays to be seen. Nonetheless, Altman’s essay could function one thing acquainted — a preview of the place OpenAI is probably going headed subsequent.
