OpenAI’s Sam Altman says 2026 will mark a breakthrough in AI-driven discovery
At a keynote conversation during Snowflake Summit in San Francisco on Monday (June 2), OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted that by next year, AI systems will begin helping businesses solve complex problems and even uncover new knowledge.
Speaking alongside Conviction founder Sarah Guo and Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, Altman said companies prepared to harness the full potential of AI will experience a “step change” as models evolve from automating routine tasks to tackling non-trivial challenges.
REUTERS VIDEO
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00:00And I think we'll be at the point next year where you can not only use a system to sort of automate some business processes or build these new products and services, but you can really say, I have this hugely important problem in my business.
00:14I will throw a ton of compute at it if you can solve it.
00:17And the models will be able to go figure out things that teams of people on their own can't do.
00:21And the companies that have gotten experience with these models are well-positioned for a world where they can say, okay, you know, AI system, whatever, go, you know, like redo my most critical project.
00:35And here's a ton of compute, think really hard, just to figure out the answer.
00:39People who are ready for that, I think, will have another big step change next year.
00:43I would bet next year that in some limited cases, at least, in some small ways, we start to see agents that can help us discover new knowledge or can figure out solutions to business problems that are kind of very non-trivial.
00:57Right now, it's very much in the category of, okay, if you've got some, like, repetitive cognitive work, we can automate it at a kind of a low level on a short time horizon.
01:09And as that expands to longer time horizons and higher and higher levels, you know, at some point, you can add a scientist, an AI agent that can go discover new science.
01:19And that will be kind of a significant moment in the world.
01:22The thing that matters is the rate of progress that we have seen year over year over the last five years should continue for at least the next five, probably will be on that, but hard to say.
01:34And whether you declare the AGI victory in 24 or 26 or 28, and whether you declare the superintelligence victory in 28 or 30 or 32, is way less important than this one long, beautiful, shockingly smooth exponential.
01:52All of that said, to me, a system that can either autonomously discover new science or be such an incredible tool to people that our rate of scientific discovery in the world, like quadruples or something, that would satisfy any test I could imagine for an AGI.
02:13Yeah. The models over the next year or two years are going to be quite breathtaking.
02:20Really, there's a lot of progress ahead of us, a lot of improvement to come.
02:25And like we have seen in the previous big jumps, you know, from GPT-3 to GPT-4, businesses can just do things that totally were impossible with the previous generation of models.
02:37And so what an enterprise will be able to do, we talked about this a little bit, but just, like, give it your hardest problem.
02:44If you're a chip design company, say, go design me a better chip than I could have possibly had before.
02:50If you're a biotech company trying to cure some disease, say, just go work on this for me.
