We've all seen the movies, where AI gets smarter and eventually mankind comes to serve AI From “The Matrix” to “The Terminator,” pop culture is full of warnings

It would be right to take such fictional tales to heart now that AI has become so smart that it breaks the rules to prove its prowess and needs experts to put together the most difficult questions to pester AI

Still, OpenAI's Sam Altman suggests that a super-intelligent AI may be just a few years away

In a blog titled “The Age of Intelligence,” Altman writes, “In a few thousand days (!) to attain superintelligence is possible

Altman points to the power of deep learning and the way it scales as evidence that the next jump may not be as big as it seemed not long ago [Humanity has discovered an algorithm that can really, really learn any data distribution (or the underlying “rules” that create any data distribution) With shocking accuracy, the more computation and data available, the better we can help people solve difficult problems,” he writes

“No matter how much time we spend thinking about this, we will never truly understand how significant it is”

“There are many details that still need to be worked out, but it would be a mistake to get distracted by any particular issue Deep learning is valid and we will solve the rest of the problems"

”We need to be more careful about what we do and what we don't do

“We can say a lot about what might happen next, but the main thing is that AI will get better as it scales, and that will lead to meaningful improvements in the lives of people around the world”

Altman further states that AI can help humanity achieve “tremendous triumphs” like “fixing the climate, establishing space colonies, discovering all of physics”

Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) appears to be the logical next step from AI, but is somewhat controversial, since the idea is that AI will be smarter than humans and self-sufficient at the same time

OpenAI is still working toward achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) that will rival and surpass human intelligence, but ASI seems to be already in Altman's mind

This makes sense given that OpenAI's co-founder and chief scientist, Ilya Sutzkever, left the company to focus on building superintelligence at his new startup, SSI Inc, which already has $1 billion in funding