--- title: "Sam Altman Invents Bizarre New Unit of Time for Measuring When His Promises Will Come True" description: "OpenAI CEO Sam Altman waxed prolific about the future of artificial intelligence and chose some strange units of measurement to describe." date: "2024-09-24" modified: "2024-09-24" authors: - name: "Noor Al-Sibai" job_title: "Senior Staff Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/nooralsibai" url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/sam-altman-few-thousand-days" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" - "OpenAI" tags: - "OpenAI" - "sam altman" - "superintelligence" - "the digest" --- # Sam Altman Invents Bizarre New Unit of Time for Measuring When His Promises Will Come True ![OpenAI CEO Sam Altman waxed prolific about the future of artificial intelligence and chose some strange units of measurement to describe.]() *\Image: Bryan R. Smith / Pool / AFP via Getty\* ## Go Off King In a slightly manic new screed, OpenAI CEO and cofounder Sam Altman waxed prolific about the future of artificial intelligence — and invented a strange new unit of measurement to describe when his predictions might finally come to pass. Altman's blog post, titled "[The Intelligence Age]()" and published to his personal website, started out sounding like a relatively average tech CEO missive. "In the next couple of decades," the CEO wrote, "we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents." But the further he gets into detail, the wilder the promises start to sound, with Altman asserting that the said "magic" will include things like "fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics," achievements that will "eventually become commonplace." And when will all this happen? To count down to this magical future, Altman debuted a new measure of time: "a few thousand days," which in regular English translates to "an indeterminate number of years." And, close readers will notice, he even hedged that. "It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there," Altman wrote. ## Timing Is Everything If "a few" means, [as *Dictionary.com* defines it](), anywhere between two and eight but generally refers to bundles of two, three, or four, Altman could be talking about anywhere from 2,000 to 8,000 days, which would be equivalent to between five and 21 years (to remember how long ago 21 years actually is, 21 years ago was when George W. Bush invaded Iraq.) The 39-year-old computer scientist continued to play around with tenses, boasting that humanity has reached this "doorstep of the next leap in prosperity" because, as he put it, "deep learning worked." "That’s really it; humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data," Altman continued. He added that to a "shocking degree of precision" — and here we have to argue that the CEO is speaking overbroadly if not incorrectly, given that [OpenAI's large language models]() (LLMs) and [others]() are [still known for bullshitting]() — the "more compute and data available, the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems." "I find that no matter how much time I spend thinking about this," Altman concluded. "I can never really internalize how consequential it is." Is the OpenAI CEO [getting high on his own supply]()? Is he just [straight-up tripping]()? Is he now the firm's number one weirdo since fellow cofounder [Ilya Sutskever finally gave up the ghost]()? Perhaps we'll find out within the next "few thousand days." **More on OpenAI:** [*OpenAI Threatening to Ban Users for Asking Strawberry About Its Reasoning*]() ## Author At Futurism, I've often been drawn to unpacking the narratives that underlie technological, scientific and medical progress, with a special interest in areas of conflict and ambiguity that end up setting agendas and steering the fates of both elites and the hoi polloi. I'm a committed generalist, but I often find myself returning to work involving NASA and the private space sector, the effects of AI on media and society, and the mechanics of the pharmaceutical industry, with a specific focus on the spread of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. Prior to Futurism, I worked for publications ranging from Media Matters and Truthdig to Raw Story and Bustle. I'm also the author of "Myspace Scene Queens," a 2024 title in Instar Books' acclaimed "Remember the Internet" series. My work at Futurism has been cited by outlets including the New Yorker, Slate, Nieman Lab, the Verge, the MIT Technology Review, the Sunday Times, and the Daily Beast. I grew up in North Carolina, attended the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and now live in Brooklyn, New York. In my free time, I'm an avid reader and music fan; you can probably find me at a local poetry reading, concert, underground rave, or DJ set. I'm the proud parent of an ineffable orange cat named Mee-Mow. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()