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The AI news cycle didn't slow down much this holiday season. Blink and you'll miss some new developments between OpenAI's 12-day “shipmas” and DeepSeek's major model release on Christmas Day.
And its momentum has not slowed down even now. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a blog post on Sunday that OpenAI knows how to build artificial general intelligence (AGI) and is starting to set its sights on superintelligence. He said he was thinking about it.
AGI is a vague term, but OpenAI has its own definition. It is “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at the most economically valuable tasks.” Superintelligence, which Altman understands as a step beyond AGI, has the potential to “significantly accelerate” innovation far beyond what humans can achieve alone, he said in a blog post.
“[OpenAI continues] “We believe that putting great tools in people's hands repeatedly leads to great, far-reaching results,” Altman wrote.
Altman, like Dario Amodei, CEO of OpenAI rival Anthropic, optimistically believes that AGI and superintelligence will bring wealth and prosperity to everyone. But assuming AGI and superintelligence are possible without new technological advances, how can we be sure they will benefit everyone?
The latest concerning data point is a study reported on X by Wharton professor Ethan Mollick earlier this month. Researchers from the National University of Singapore, the University of Rochester, and Tsinghua University investigated the impact of ChatGPT, OpenAI's AI-powered chatbot, on freelancers in different labor markets.
The study identified economic “AI inflection points” for various occupations. Before the inflection point, AI increased the income of freelancers. For example, web developers saw an increase of up to 65%. However, after an inflection point, AI began to replace freelancers. The number of translators has decreased by about 30%.
This study suggests that once AI begins to replace jobs, the trend will not reverse. And if better AI does indeed emerge, that should be a concern for all of us.
In his post, Altman said he is “quite confident” that “everyone” will understand the importance of “maximizing broad benefits and power” in the age of AGI and superintelligence. I wrote. But what if he's wrong? What happens when AGI and superintelligence emerges, and corporations are the only ones with anything to show for it?
As a result, the world will not be better off, but more of the same inequalities. And if that is the legacy of AI, it will be very depressing.
news
Image credit: Moor Studio / Getty Images
Silicon Valley prevents catastrophe: Technologists have long warned about the potential for AI to cause catastrophic damage. But in 2024, these warning voices have been drowned out.
OpenAI losses: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company is currently losing money on its $200 per month ChatGPT Pro plan because people are using it more than the company expected. Ta.
Record generative AI funding: Investment in generative AI, which includes a variety of AI-powered apps, tools, and services that generate text, images, video, audio, music, and more, reached new heights last year.
Microsoft increases data center spending: Microsoft has allocated $80 billion in 2025 to build data centers designed to handle AI workloads.
Grok 3 MIA: xAI's next-generation AI model, Grok 3, did not arrive on time, furthering the trend of flagship models missing promised launch times.
This week's research paper
AI can make many mistakes. But it can also significantly enhance the work of professionals.
At least, that's what a team of researchers from the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found. New research suggests that investors who use OpenAI's GPT-4o to summarize earnings reports realize higher returns than those who don't.
The researchers recruited investors and had GPT-4o provide them with AI summaries tailored to their investment expertise. Sophisticated investors got more technical AI-generated notes, while beginners got simpler notes.
Experienced investors saw a 9.6% increase in one-year returns after using GPT-4o, while inexperienced investors saw a 1.7% increase. I don't think it's that bad of a collaboration between AI and humans.
this week's model
Performance of METAGEN-1 on various benchmarks. Image credit: Prime Intellect
Prime Intellect, a startup that builds infrastructure for distributed AI system training, has released an AI model that it claims can help detect pathogens.
The model, called METAGENE-1, was trained on a dataset of more than 1.5 trillion DNA and RNA base pairs sequenced from human wastewater samples. METAGENE-1, created in partnership with the University of Southern California and SecureBio's Nucleic Acid Observatory, can be used for a variety of metagenomic applications, including biological research, Prime Intellect said.
“METAGENE-1 achieves state-of-the-art performance across a variety of genomic benchmarks and new evaluations focused on the detection of human pathogens,” Prime Intellect wrote in a series of posts about X. “After pre-training, this model is designed to support: missions in the areas of biosurveillance, pandemic surveillance and pathogen detection.”
grab bag
In response to legal action from a major music publisher, Anthropic has agreed to maintain guardrails that prevent its AI-powered chatbot, Claude, from sharing copyrighted lyrics.
Labels including Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO sued Anthropic in 2023, alleging copyright infringement by the startup, which trained its AI system on the lyrics of at least 500 songs. The lawsuit has not yet been resolved, but for the time being Anthropic will not allow Claude to provide lyrics for songs owned by the publisher or create lyrics for new songs based on copyrighted material. I agreed to ban it.
“Consistent with existing copyright law, Anthropic will now demonstrate that the use of potentially copyrighted material to train generative AI models is exemplary fair use,” Anthropic said in a statement. I'm also looking forward to it.”