Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and a leading voice in the AI sphere, has made a strong public statement regarding the timeline for achieving Superintelligence or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—systems that can perform tasks at or beyond human level across all domains. Altman predicts that it is highly likely we will see models capable of achieving things humans cannot do by the end of the decade, possibly in the next five years. He noted that even the current version, GPT-5, is already "smarter than me, at least, I think a lot of other people too" in many respects.
However, Altman's predictions are coupled with warnings about the existential risks if the technology is not governed properly, reiterating his call for global regulatory frameworks.
On the impact to employment, Altman shifted the focus from entire jobs disappearing to the percentage of tasks being automated. He estimates that he "can easily imagine a world where 30, 40 per cent of the tasks that happen in the economy today get done by AI in the not very distant future." Roles like customer support, especially phone or computer-based services, are among the first likely to be significantly transformed or eliminated. Even programming jobs are changing, with AI tools enabling coders to be "hugely more productive." Altman views this disruption as an opportunity, asserting that while a lot of tasks will change, human creativity and desire to be useful will lead to entirely new jobs and focuses for workers.