Interesting post from Sam Altman on his blog after the release of o3 Pro yesterday.
Proclaiming that we’ve entered the intelligence takeoff is more than notable. As he rightly notes, being where we are would have sounded crazy just five years ago and might sound crazier than where we’ll be in 2030 based on where we are now.
A few parts that stuck out below.
I often hear people say wild things about how much water and energy is used by a single exchange with ChatGPT. It’s never passed the smell test for me. I may be off, but I have the impression of people saying things like, “a gallon of water every time you say ‘thank you’”. These have felt to me like copes from upper middle class progressives types looking to insert their climate-conscious-bona-fides. But, the numbers seem quite low:
(People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, about what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes. It also uses about 0.000085 gallons of water; roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon.)
On jobs change:
There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before. We probably won’t adopt a new social contract all at once, but when we look back in a few decades, the gradual changes will have amounted to something big.