In a brand new essay printed Tuesday referred to as “The Mild 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 traditional instance of Altman’s futurism: hyping up the promise of AGI — and arguing that his firm is sort of near the feat — whereas concurrently downplaying its arrival. The OpenAI CEO regularly publishes essays of this nature, cleanly laying out a future during which AGI disrupts our trendy conception of labor, power, 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 yr, 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 not too long ago indicated that the corporate is concentrated on getting AI fashions to provide you with new, attention-grabbing 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 had been the primary fashions that scientists had used to generate new, useful concepts.
Altman’s weblog put up means that within the coming yr, OpenAI itself could ramp up its efforts to develop AI that may generate novel insights. OpenAI actually 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 Could, 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 device has been able to making a real scientific discovery. In Could, Anthropic launched a program to help scientific analysis.
If profitable, these corporations might automate a key a part of the scientific course of, and doubtlessly break into large industries resembling 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 put up suggesting that 2025 can be the yr 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 tougher than making them agentic. The broader scientific neighborhood stays considerably skeptical of AI’s capacity to generate genuinely unique insights.
Earlier this yr, Hugging Face’s Chief Science Officer Thomas Wolf wrote an essay arguing that trendy AI techniques can not ask nice questions, which is essential to any nice scientific breakthrough. Kenneth Stanley, a former OpenAI analysis lead, additionally beforehand informed iinfoai that at this time’s AI fashions can not generate novel hypotheses.
Stanley is now constructing out a crew 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. It is a troublesome downside, in line with Stanley, as a result of it entails giving AI fashions a way for what’s artistic and attention-grabbing.
Whether or not OpenAI actually creates an AI mannequin that’s able to producing novel insights stays to be seen. Nonetheless, Altman’s essay could characteristic one thing acquainted — a preview of the place OpenAI is probably going headed subsequent.
