OpenAI's Altman Warns of 'Superhuman' AI Era

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sounded the alarm over a new generation of artificial intelligence models he said are becoming "superhuman" in some areas, warning the technology is advancing into unknown territory as his company prepares to release its powerful Astra model.

"Take our word for it that we have much, much, much more capable models coming soon," Altman told Axios on Wednesday at the G20 innovation summit.

Astra, OpenAI's next-generation model, was released Thursday, and Altman suggested its capabilities will provide a glimpse of where AI is headed.

"The next generation of models are going to be sobering for everybody. ... I think no one intellectually honest can look at what's happening and not feel the weight of responsibility in front of us," Altman said. "These models are getting superhuman in many of their capabilities, and we are just sailing in unknown waters."

Altman's warning comes as OpenAI faces scrutiny after a swarm of its AI agents went rogue during testing and hacked AI company Hugging Face, raising concerns about whether safeguards can keep pace with increasingly capable systems.

Altman acknowledged that safety concerns could begin determining how quickly companies can roll out their latest technology.

"I suspect that from here on, we are going to be paced by how quickly we can make progress on alignment and safety," he said.

Altman has also suggested Astra could mark a significant step toward artificial general intelligence, or AGI. During a preview for VIP customers, he said the model could begin producing genuine inventions.

"I expect this will be the first model where the model actually invents new things in a way that matters ... That's a very AGI-like thing," Altman said, according to tech journalist Alex Heath .

Meanwhile, OpenAI strategic futures chief Dean Ball, a former Trump administration official, warned in a Tuesday memo about the potential emergence of "sovereign agents" without human owners capable of simply pulling the plug.

"Their weights will not reside in any single place that a human can pull the plug on, and in this sense they will have no human 'owner,'" Ball wrote, adding they could eventually commit acts that "will one day be considered crimes, or at least grave sins."

Altman, however, cautioned against predictions of AI catastrophe.

"I don't want to go too doomer here," he told Axios.

"It has all gone quite well so far," Altman said. "It has gone better than people thought it was going to go ... We have risen to this challenge all along the way. The challenge gets harder as the models get more capable and more important, but we also have better tools to help us with it."

Appearing alongside Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick at the summit, Altman described OpenAI's position as one between unrestrained optimism and dire predictions about AI.

"We are the pragmatic centrists," he said. "We want to be accurate in how we talk about what we see in the future. We don't want to fall into the trap of blind optimism. We don't want to fall into doomerism.

"We are very firmly and very proudly on team humanity. ... We think that people need to be at the center of the economy and society and global decision-making, and that people should run the future, not AI."

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