I suspect he got asked it a lot. There was a lot of interesting work going on back then but people basically didn’t have any notion that there was a path from there to any kind of AGI. (In that respect they might’ve been somewhat more clued up than Altman.)
I think it’s a natural thing to preemptively defend against the obvious counterpoint when you’re railing against the thesis that current AI work isn’t going to deliver on the “I”.
I suspect he got asked it a lot. There was a lot of interesting work going on back then but people basically didn’t have any notion that there was a path from there to any kind of AGI. (In that respect they might’ve been somewhat more clued up than Altman.)
I think it’s a natural thing to preemptively defend against the obvious counterpoint when you’re railing against the thesis that current AI work isn’t going to deliver on the “I”.
Having said that, that this is the kind of thing Altman might say unironically speaks volumes. He really does have a trillion-dollar monorail to sell.