9月24日，OpenAI CEO山姆·奥特曼（Sam Altman）罕见地在其个人社交平台X上发表了一篇长文，题为《智能时代》（"The Intelligence Age"），引发了超过百万次的观看。
在这篇长文中山姆·奥特曼讲述了他对人工智能驱动的技术进步将带来全球繁荣的未来愿景。他认为，超级人工智能可能在未来十年内出现。
奥特曼将我们现在所处的时代称之为“智能时代”的黎明，深度学习算法的成功是这个新时代的催化剂，随着规模扩大表现越好，人类可能在几千天内实现超级智能。
不过，他也提到，AI技术也会有缺点，“会对劳动市场产生显著变化（好与坏）”，我们需要现在开始努力，最大化人工智能的好处，同时最小化其危害。”他预测，人工智能在未来，将使教育、医疗、软件开发和其他领域取得突破。
以下是奥特曼《智能时代》全文：
在接下来的几十年里，我们将能够做些被祖父母视为魔法的事情。
这一现象并不新鲜，但将会加速。随着时间的推移，人类的能力将显著提升，我们现在我们能够完成一些前辈们认为不可能的事情。
我们的能力并不是因为基因的改变，而是因为我们受益于社会的基础设施的支持，让我们变得比任何一个人都要聪明和强大；从某种重要意义上讲，社会本身就是一种高级智能。我们的祖父母和之前的几代人取得了伟大成就，他们为我们人类进步搭建了基础架构，我们都从中受益。人工智能将为人们提供复杂问题的工具，帮助我们添加新的支柱，这是我们自己无法想象的。进步的故事将继续，我们的孩子将能够做我们现在无法做到的事情。
这一切不会很快发生，但我们很快能与人工智能合作，完成比以往更多的任务。最终，每个人都可以拥有一个自己的人工智能团队，里面有各领域的虚拟专家，他们共同协作创造出几乎我们能够想象的任何事物。我们的孩子将拥有提供个性化指导的虚拟导师，能够覆盖任何科目、任何语言，并以他们所需的速度学习。我们可以想象类似的方案，用于更好的医疗保健、开发任何人能够想象的软件，等等。
拥有这些新能力后，我们可以实现共享繁荣，达到今天难以想象的高度。未来，每个人的生活都可以比现在任何人的生活都要好。虽然繁荣本身并不一定使人快乐——有许多富有却痛苦的人——但它将显著改善全球人们的生活品质。
从一个狭义的角度来看待人类历史：经过数千年的科学发现和技术进步的积累，我们已经找到了如何溶化沙子，添加杂质，以令人惊讶的精度在极小的尺度上排列成计算机芯片，给它们通电，最终得到能够创造日益强大的人工智能的系统。
这可能是迄今为止历史上最重要的事实。我们有可能在几千天内实现超级智能！可能会需要更长的时间，但我相信我们最终会实现这一目标。
那么，我们如何实现下一次繁荣飞跃？
可以用六个字来概括：深度学习有效。
用一句话来说：深度学习取得成功，随着规模的扩大，可以预见它会变得更好，我们为此投入了更多资源。
就这么简单；人类发现了一种算法，能够真正学习任何数据分布（或者说，产生任何数据分布的基本“规则”）。令人震惊的是，计算能力和数据越多，它在帮助人们解决难题时的表现就越好。我发现，无论我花多少时间思考这一点，我都无法真正内化它的重要性。
我们仍然需要解决很多细节，但被任何特定挑战分散注意力是个错误。深度学习有效，我们将解决剩下的问题。关于未来可能发生的事情，我们有很多设想，但最主要的是，人工智能将随着规模的扩大而变得更好，这将为全球人们的生活带来实质性的改善。
人工智能模型很快将作为自主个人助手，代表我们完成特定任务，比如协调医疗护理。在未来某个时刻，随着技术的进步，人工智能系统将变得更加出色，帮助我们创造更好的下一代系统，并推动各领域的科学进步。
技术将我们从石器时代带入农业时代，再到工业时代。从这里开始，通往智能时代的道路铺满了计算能力、能源和人类的意志。
如果我们想把人工智能放在尽可能多的人手中，就需要降低计算成本，使其变得丰富（这需要大量的能源和芯片）。如果我们不建设足够的基础设施，人工智能将成为一种非常有限的资源，可能会引发战争，并主要成为富人的工具。
我们需要明智而坚定地行动。智能时代的到来是一个重要的发展，伴随着非常复杂且高风险的挑战。这并不是一个完全积极的故事，但其潜力如此巨大，我们有责任为自己和未来找出如何应对眼前的风险。
我相信，未来将会如此光明，只是现在无人能用文字准确地描述它，但智能时代的一个定义特征将是巨大的繁荣。
虽然这一切将逐步发生，但令人震惊的成就最终将变得司空见惯，比如修复气候问题、建立太空殖民地和发现所有物理法则——最终将变得司空见惯。凭借近乎无限的智慧和丰富的能源——创造伟大想法的能力，以及实现这些想法的能力——我们将能够创造出许多伟大的想法，并将其变为现实。
正如我们在其他技术中看到的，也会有缺点，我们需要现在就开始努力，最大化人工智能的好处，同时最小化其危害。例如，我们预计这项技术在未来几年可能会对劳动市场产生显著变化（好与坏），但大多数工作会比人们想象的变化得更慢，我不担心我们会用尽可以做的事情（即使这些事情在今天看起来并不是“真实的工作”）。人们天生渴望创造和对彼此有用，而人工智能将使我们以前所未有的方式放大自身能力。作为一个社会，我们将回到一个不断扩展的世界，重新关注于积极的和共赢的游戏。
如今我们做的许多工作，在几百年前的人看来可能是微不足道的，是在浪费时间，但没有人希望成为充当点燃街灯的灯夫。如果一个点灯人能看到今天的世界，他会认为周围的繁荣是难以想象的。如果我们能从今天起，快进100年，我们周围的繁荣将同样难以想象。
In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents.
This phenomenon is not new, but it will be newly accelerated. People have become dramatically more capable over time; we can already accomplish things now that our predecessors would have believed to be impossible.
We are more capable not because of genetic change, but because we benefit from the infrastructure of society being way smarter and more capable than any one of us; in an important sense, society itself is a form of advanced intelligence. Our grandparents – and the generations that came before them – built and achieved great things. They contributed to the scaffolding of human progress that we all benefit from. AI will give people tools to solve hard problems and help us add new struts to that scaffolding that we couldn’t have figured out on our own. The story of progress will continue, and our children will be able to do things we can’t.
It won’t happen all at once, but we’ll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI; eventually we can each have a personal AI team, full of virtual experts in different areas, working together to create almost anything we can imagine. Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need. We can imagine similar ideas for better healthcare, the ability to create any kind of software someone can imagine, and much more.
With these new abilities, we can have shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today; in the future, everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now. Prosperity alone doesn’t necessarily make people happy – there are plenty of miserable rich people – but it would meaningfully improve the lives of people around the world.
Here is one narrow way to look at human history: after thousands of years of compounding scientific discovery and technological progress, we have figured out how to melt sand, add some impurities, arrange it with astonishing precision at extraordinarily tiny scale into computer chips, run energy through it, and end up with systems capable of creating increasingly capable artificial intelligence.
This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there.
How did we get to the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity?
In three words: deep learning worked.
In 15 words: deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we dedicated increasing resources to it.
That’s really it; humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data). To a shocking degree of precision, the more compute and data available, the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems. I find that no matter how much time I spend thinking about this, I can never really internalize how consequential it is.
There are a lot of details we still have to figure out, but it’s a mistake to get distracted by any particular challenge. Deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems. We can say a lot of things about what may happen next, but the main one is that AI is going to get better with scale, and that will lead to meaningful improvements to the lives of people around the world.
AI models will soon serve as autonomous personal assistants who carry out specific tasks on our behalf like coordinating medical care on your behalf. At some point further down the road, AI systems are going to get so good that they help us make better next-generation systems and make scientific progress across the board.
Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy, and human will.
If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people.
We need to act wisely but with conviction. The dawn of the Intelligence Age is a momentous development with very complex and extremely high-stakes challenges. It will not be an entirely positive story, but the upside is so tremendous that we owe it to ourselves, and the future, to figure out how to navigate the risks in front of us.
I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now; a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be massive prosperity.
Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace. With nearly-limitless intelligence and abundant energy – the ability to generate great ideas, and the ability to make them happen – we can do quite a lot.
As we have seen with other technologies, there will also be downsides, and we need to start working now to maximize AI’s benefits while minimizing its harms. As one example, we expect that this technology can cause a significant change in labor markets (good and bad) in the coming years, but most jobs will change more slowly than most people think, and I have no fear that we’ll run out of things to do (even if they don’t look like “real jobs” to us today). People have an innate desire to create and to be useful to each other, and AI will allow us to amplify our own abilities like never before. As a society, we will be back in an expanding world, and we can again focus on playing positive-sum games.
Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter. If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable.
