OpenAI boss suggests there’s the equivalent of Moore’s law for AI and it’s ‘unbelievably stronger’

OpenAI boss Sam Altman has been merrily blogging away about his thoughts on AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, and there’s a lot of food for thought. A key takeaway, however, is his link between Moore’s Law, and what he perceives to be the AI equivalent.

Point two of his “three observations” regarding the oncoming AGI future discusses the idea that “the cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use.”

Altman goes on to say that Moore’s law “changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger.”

Moore’s Law is defined as the principle that the speed and capability of computers can be expected to double every two years, due to the increase in transistor counts between generations of hardware, for a minimal cost.

As a guiding principle for measuring chip development it’s widely regarded to be no longer true, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang often noting it’s dead and buried, although it’s still often cited as a frame of reference for technological development as a whole.

However, AI development appears to have moved at a relentless pace in recent years, and OpenAI has been at the forefront of it with various iterations of its ChatGPT AI chatbot.

According to Altman, Artificial General Intelligence is the next step, and is already moving apace—and if his observations prove accurate, the gigantic price drops in relation to AI usage over time might be a suitable metric to define AI development in a similar way.

Altman’s Law then, perhaps. Or so he likely hopes. Moore’s Law was named after an observation by Gordon Moore, an Intel co-founder who observed in 1965 that the number of components in an integrated circuit was doubling every year, before adjusting his theory in 1975 to doubling every two years.

It became a guiding principle in the semiconductor industry to ensure future-resistant long term planning, although has fallen out of favor since.

The real meat and potatoes of Altman’s observations surrounds what he sees as the AGI-led future to come, and how it may help unlock the creativity and productivity of us mere worker drones due to what he sees as the fabulous potential of the tech.

Still, if you happen to create a new law while musing away on your blog, that’s a happy accident, isn’t it? Presumably he didn’t need any AI help to do it, either. There’s hope for us all then.