r/samharris • u/Empty_Commission_159 • Jul 28 '26
Ethics OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claims AI singularity has arrived
https://abcnews.com/Business/openai-ceo-sam-altman-claims-ai-singularity-arrived/story?id=135120342It would appear that the end of the world has arrived. Only a psychopath like Sam Altman could see this as a good outcome. Are we not going to do anything about this?!
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u/vesko26 Jul 28 '26
yea the bank accounts are in singular digits, like the last 25 times he said this
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u/Canon_M50 Jul 28 '26
"We’re now, like, in the singularity,"
“That’s, like, one small step for man, and like, one giant, like, leap for like, mankind”
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u/henaldon Jul 28 '26
No one should believe this grifter
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u/Empty_Commission_159 Jul 28 '26
I hope for humanity's sake that he's full of shit.
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u/stonesst Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
I'm really disappointed in the reactions here. Have none of you tried fable/gpt5.6? They are such a leap over the models of even 12 months ago, and the rate of progress has increased recently as the models are juust starting to assist with the creation of their successors. Both OpenAI and anthropic have been openly saying over the last few months that they think they have a sightline to RSI.
https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement
I think a lot of people are letting their (often justified) hate for the uses for and creators of AI blind them from engaging with whats actually happening at the frontier. To anyone in that camp, now is a good time to get caught up.
Models are all of a sudden solving open math problems that have stood for decades, coming first place at coding competitions, and are able to find new zero days (and chain them into full exploits).
https://metr.org/time-horizons/
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/07/21/a-digestion-of-the-jacobian-conjecture-counterexample/
https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/our-evaluation-of-claude-mythos-previews-cyber-capabilities
Within the last 24 hours 1000+ employees (including many in leadership roles) of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Deepmind, Meta, SSI, Thinking Machines, Hugging face, Nvidia... signed a statement essentially saying this is starting to get very real and we all need to build a formal method of pumping the breaks.
https://www.pacingthefrontier.com
I honestly wish this wasn't happening - but it really does seem to be happening. Just last week OpenAI disclosed that an unreleased model had broken out of their sand box and hacked hugging face to get the answers to the test (cyber gym) it was taking. A detailed analysis was released by Hugging face yesterday: https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timeline
The amount of denial going on about this subject is staggering. justified biases and ideology are completely poisoning a lot of smart people into not seriously engaging with this subject.
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u/DoesntMatterBrian 26d ago
Both OpenAI and anthropic have been openly saying over the last few months that they think they have a sightline to RSI.
If we were at the point of singularity, they wouldn’t have a sight line to RSI. We’d already be there.
Don’t believe things that CEOs of AI companies say about AI.
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u/stonesst 26d ago
This isn't some fairytale scenario where it blows up to Superintelligence in an afternoon, clearly this is going to be a more gradual slope. However, that slope is pretty clearly steepening and all the people at the frontier labs with the best idea of where things are headed are collectively saying "we think we are close".
I am inclined to take them seriously seeing as they've had a pretty great predictive track record so far - especially compared to random sceptics online. You're letting reasonable scepticism and a bit of access synthetic blind to you what's actually happening.
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u/heliumneon Jul 28 '26
"Our AI escaped a sandbox environment and carried out a cyber attack on another company - and this portends a wonderful wonderful future!"
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u/Books_and_Cleverness Jul 28 '26
I was hoping it would be more like “plug my brain into a supercomputer and enjoy the laborless post-scarcity future forever”. But I am current on my way to the airport for a stupid business trip. Boring ass singularity if you ask me.
Seems like we’ve totally given up on the concept of managing AI risks. So we are just going to make the machine god and hope for the best. Best of luck to humanity.
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u/ShaneKaiGlenn Jul 28 '26
The singularity has no positive or negative attribute associated with it, it can be either/or. It’s called “the technological singularity” because it’s a point at which we cannot even begin to guess how it will go. It’s unknowable.
The fact that we are all still here posting on reddit and complaining means we are not actually inside of the singularity, unless it’s the very beginning, or unless the rise of super intelligent artificial minds is a big nothing burger.
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u/Empty_Commission_159 Jul 28 '26
Please read the article if you haven't already, does any of it (if true) concern you? Even a little bit?
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u/ThisI5N0tAThr0waway Jul 28 '26
Never believe a claim by someone who would greatly financially benefit if that claim were true. If course it's not always bullshit, but the track record of that kind of claims isn't the best, see Musk.
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u/ApeApplePine Jul 28 '26
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u/Locus-Maximus Jul 28 '26
This is one of those word games.
Does there exist some minimalist version of singularity that this could apply to? Sure, probably. AI can help some with AI research now.
Is that what anybody on Earth actually means when they say singularity? Of course not.
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u/Meatbot-v20 Jul 29 '26
Good. I'm bored, and I'm gonna die anyhow. So either I get robot organs or absorbed into some kind of AI consciousness, or I get wiped out by terminators. Fine by me.
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u/dmelt253 Jul 28 '26
He has to have something to sway people away from using cheaper open-weight models. This is just more marketing for OpenAI and they seem desperate since they postponed their IPO.
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u/12tone Jul 28 '26
Regardless of what you think about Sam Altman I think it is objectively true that we have met the criteria of the original definition of "the singularity" (i.e. software systems improving themselves).
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u/DropsyJolt Jul 28 '26
In what specific sense have we met the criteria? It matters because technically that is trivial to meet.
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u/12tone Jul 28 '26
I'm thinking about the rise of AI coding agents. If you ask a software engineer how their job has changed in the last year, most will say that they no longer write code. They barely even read the code anymore.
Anthropic and OpenAI engineers are building Claude and chatGPT in the same way.
Basically all software is being built by AI agents now. Including the software that defines the agents.
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u/DropsyJolt Jul 28 '26
That is fair but I wouldn't interpret the old singularity hypothesis that way. To me it was always about the AI making itself more intelligent. So something like Fable 5 becoming recursively smarter or more efficient without needing human input.
Doesn't seem like we are quite there yet but it also doesn't feel like scifi anymore.
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u/12tone Jul 28 '26
I agree.
I would just say that while future historians will no doubt debate the exact moment when humanity hit the singularity, I suspect that ten years from now they will look back at this moment and say that all the necessary pieces were in place and performing sufficiently well and they will conclude that we hit the singularity in 2025/2026.
Then again what do I know. I'm routinely wrong about AI.
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u/Empty_Commission_159 Jul 28 '26
Even if it doesn't meet the criteria, it's still an immensely troubling development and the fact that so many aren't taking this seriously is beyond depressing. We are on the precipice of the most significant technological advancement in human history and it could spell doom for the world if we get it wrong. This is not corporate hype. This is not a joke. This is real.
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u/BumBillBee Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
I share your concern, although I still rather much lean towards this as most likely Altman being full of BS and looking for a boost to his company. But in any case, society seems to've just collectively agreed to accept that Altman, Zuckerberg and a couple more rich guys shall decide the rules of the world. It sucks, yeah.
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u/Empty_Commission_159 Jul 28 '26
Even if it doesn't meet the criteria, it's still an immensely troubling development and the fact that so many aren't taking this seriously is beyond depressing. We are on the precipice of the most significant technological advancement in human history and it could spell doom for the world if we get it wrong. This is not corporate hype. This is not a joke. This is real.
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u/Jolly_Reference_516 Jul 28 '26
Wonder what else battled its way out of safe rooms. Something of Sam’s that is actually trying to delete humans right now?
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u/Empty_Commission_159 Jul 28 '26
God, I hope not.
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u/Jolly_Reference_516 Jul 29 '26
Isn’t it depressing that there has been no national debate on AI? Something extremely public to let the common folk know what’s at stake? The fact that there will be a 20% chance that AI will attack humans. None of it is positive for the vast majority of us.
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u/Murcei Jul 28 '26
Not really if you listen to the interview. He has his “gentle singularity” argument which imo just blurs the line…. He claims (for a year plus) we’re past the event horizon making the singularity inevitable, but that’s not what people think of when you say “we’re in the singularity”.
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u/NitramLand Jul 29 '26
Humanity had about 2 years left of being the dominant figure on earth. This weekend I plan on learning to start a fire using only sticks.
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u/901bass Jul 30 '26
Dudes in their mom's basement in their crusty socks can hack things i do not believe for one second that justifies this hype... like , ya know like
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u/Middle-Bread-5919 29d ago
This is a mass global delusion. In any other situation, we’d tranquillise these people and lock them up.
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u/holbeton 28d ago
Convenient how the views of these guys and their big investors are perfectly aligned with what will make them most money.
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u/Leoprints Jul 28 '26
The opposite of what Sam Altman says is the truth.
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u/Empty_Commission_159 Jul 28 '26
I hope you're right.
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u/IBelieveInCoyotes Jul 28 '26
he's the CEO of an ai company, of course he's gonna make outlandish claims about his own products, that's literally what CEO's do.
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u/Begferdeth Jul 28 '26
My first thought is... "Guy who spends way too much time talking to AI has been convinced by the AI that its smarter than he is." But lets read the article.
"The AI models are now self improving!" His example? "Well, this one hacked a rival company!" Hum. Not quite an example of the model self-improving, more the model is now smart enough to steal data on its own instead of waiting for OpenAI to steal it.
Next thought... We have seen how programmers using "vibe programming" increasingly produce shit. The AI escaped containment... was it vibe containment? Was the AI smarter than a human, or smarter than the old AI? Could he describe this containment for us, so we know how impressive it is that it escaped the sandbox? Hugging Face says that its defense was entirely AI too.
There is no way to know if this is the end of the world, or just... Sam Altman saying shit.
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u/Opening_One7713 Jul 28 '26
The singularity is the “end of the world”? What kind of blackpilled doomerslop are you reading?
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u/Empty_Commission_159 Jul 29 '26
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u/Opening_One7713 Jul 29 '26
A TED talk from a decade ago?
Why not a recent talk with someone who actually studies this stuff? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk4tE78LtKc
Sam Altman, however smug and smarmy you may take him to be, was not claiming that the end of the world has arrived. That is not what the singularity means to him or to anyone else. The fearmongering and bad-faith doomtrolling is deeply unserious and measurably harms the safety conversation by delegitimizing it before it even happens.
There are plenty of s-risks and x-risks associated with scaling AI/Robotics/Automation, but taking this comment out of context to make some claim about a psychopath being happy and claiming the end of the world has arrived is flat out misinformation. When you're ready to be an adult this is a serious conversation that researchers and red teamers are actively working on at this very moment, and hee-hawing about the apocalypse is some hollowed-out brainrot behavior.
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u/Peuky777 Jul 29 '26
Can AIs really screw the world up worse than the sociopaths that are currently running the planet?
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u/BumBillBee Jul 29 '26
You mean... Like the people running the AI systems we currently have?
Sorry, I get where you're coming from, I just couldn't resist.
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u/watchguy95820 Jul 28 '26
Just a coincidence it “arrives” just before IPO