Sam Altman：智能时代

在未来二三十年，我们将能实现一些在祖辈眼中堪比魔法的事情。

这种现象并非新鲜事，但它将以前所未有的速度加速发展。纵观人类历史，我们的能力一直在显著提升。如今，我们已经能完成许多在先辈看来不可能的任务。

我们能力的提升并非源于基因变化，而是得益于社会基础设施的智能化和高效化，这种集体智慧远超个人能力。

从某种意义上说，社会本身就是一种高级智能的体现。我们的祖辈以及更早的几代人创造了伟大的成就，为人类进步搭建了脚手架，而我们都从中受益。

人工智能将为我们提供解决复杂问题的工具，帮助我们在这个进步的脚手架上增添新的支撑，这些都是我们靠自己难以实现的。

进步的故事将继续书写，我们的子孙将能做到我们现在无法做到的事情。

这种变革不会一蹴而就，但很快我们就能与AI合作，完成比独自工作多得多的任务。

最终，我们每个人都可能拥有一个由各领域虚拟专家组成的个人AI团队，共同创造我们几乎可以想象到的任何事物。

我们的孩子将拥有虚拟导师，能用任何语言，以适合他们的节奏，在任何学科提供个性化的指导。类似地，我们可以想象在医疗保健、软件开发等领域也会有革命性的进步。

有了这些新能力，我们可以实现今天看来难以想象的共同繁荣。在未来，每个人的生活质量都可能超越当今最富裕者的水平。

虽然单纯的物质繁荣并不能保证幸福——毕竟富人中也不乏痛苦者——但它无疑会显著改善全球人民的生活。

从一个独特的角度来看人类历史：经过数千年科学发现和技术进步的积累，我们学会了如何熔化沙子，添加杂质，在极其微小的尺度上精确排列，制造出计算机芯片，通过它运行能量，最终创造出越来越强大的人工智能系统。

这可能是迄今为止人类历史上最具影响力的成就。我们有可能在几千天内就实现超级智能(!);即使需要更长时间，我也相信我们终将达到那个境界。

那么，是什么让我们站在了繁荣的新台阶上?

用一句话概括：深度学习成功了。

稍微详细一点说：深度学习取得了成功，随着规模扩大而可预见地变得更强，我们也投入了越来越多的资源。

就是这么简单。人类发现了一种能够真正学习任何数据分布(或者说，产生任何数据分布的底层"规则")的算法。令人惊讶的是，可用的计算力和数据越多，它在帮助人们解决复杂问题方面就越出色。无论我花多少时间思考这个问题，我都无法完全理解它的重要性。

虽然还有许多细节需要解决，但被任何特定挑战分散注意力都是错误的。深度学习是有效的，我们终将解决剩下的问题。关于未来可能发生的事情，我们可以说很多，但最重要的是AI将随着规模扩大而不断进步，这将给全球人民的生活带来实质性的改善。

AI模型很快就会成为自主个人助理，代表我们执行特定任务，比如协调医疗护理。在更远的未来，AI系统将变得如此强大，以至于能帮助我们开发更先进的系统，并在各个领域推动科学进步。

技术将人类从石器时代带入农业时代，再到工业时代。从现在开始，通往智能时代的道路将由计算能力、能源和人类意志铺就。

如果我们想让尽可能多的人受益于AI，就需要降低计算成本，使其变得普及(这需要大量的能源和芯片)。如果我们不建立足够的基础设施，AI将成为一种稀缺资源，可能引发冲突，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大发展，带来了极其复杂和高风险的挑战。这不会是一个完全积极的故事，但其潜力如此巨大，以至于我们有责任为自己和后代找出应对眼前风险的方法。

我相信未来将会如此光明，以至于现在没有人能够准确描述它。智能时代的一个显著特征将是空前的繁荣。

尽管这将是一个渐进的过程，但惊人的成就——如修复气候、建立太空殖民地和揭示所有物理学奥秘——最终将变得司空见惯。

有了近乎无限的智能和丰富的能源——既能产生伟大的想法，又能将其付诸实践——我们几乎可以实现任何事情。

正如我们在其他技术中看到的那样，AI也会带来一些负面影响，我们需要从现在开始努力，以最大化其益处，同时最小化其危害。例如，我们预计这项技术可能在未来几年对劳动力市场造成重大变化(既有好处也有坏处)，但大多数工作的变化速度可能比人们想象的要慢，我并不担心我们会无事可做(即使这些新的"工作"在今天看来可能很奇怪)。

人类有与生俱来的创造欲望，希望彼此有所贡献，AI将使我们能够前所未有地放大自身能力。作为一个社会，我们将重新进入一个不断扩张的世界，可以再次专注于创造共赢的局面。

我们今天所做的许多工作在几百年前的人看来可能微不足道，但没有人会怀念过去，希望自己是个点灯人。

如果一个点灯人能看到今天的世界，他会觉得周围的繁荣难以想象。同样，如果我们能从今天穿越到一百年后，我们周围的繁荣程度同样会让我们难以置信。

本文由Claude 3.5 Sonnet训练的AI翻译助手进行翻译，原文如下。

The Intelligence Age

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.