Sam Altman used to be ‘super anti-Burning Man.’ Now he’s a fan and sees it as how the world could look after AGI

Altman said the experience also made him see what the world can look like when artificial general intelligence — AI that is capable of matching or surpassing human intelligence — is reached.

“This is one possible, like, part of what the post-AGI world can look like,” Altman said on the podcast. “Where people are just focused on doing stuff for each other, caring for each other, and making incredible gifts to give each other.”

AGI, also known as “superintelligence,” is a longstanding goal of OpenAI. The company says on its website that AGI could “elevate humanity by increasing abundance, turbocharging the global economy, and aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge.”

The company also says a world with AGI could give everyone access to help with any cognitive task, providing more space for creativity.

Altman didn’t dive too deep into what he meant in regard to Burning Man resembling the post-AGI world on the podcast, but he said AGI could bring about a time when “we work in a new kind of way.”

Altman added that the people who make Burning Man art projects still do large amounts of work — but that creative type of work is different than some of the corporate tasks that may be automated in the future by AI. That lines up with the more utopian view of the future of AI, where robots and AI automate grueling tasks, leaving people more time to pursue different types of work and their passions (of course, there are also plenty of AI experts warning things could end up looking more dystopic).

Altman talked more about his view of where the world is going in a blog post published Monday, where he predicted we could reach “superintelligence in a few thousand days.”

“It won’t happen all at once, but we’ll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI; eventually we can each have a personal AI team, full of virtual experts in different areas, working together to create almost anything we can imagine,” Altman wrote. “Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need. We can imagine similar ideas for better healthcare, the ability to create any kind of software someone can imagine, and much more.”

“With these new abilities, we can have shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today; in the future, everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now,” he added. “Prosperity alone doesn’t necessarily make people happy – there are plenty of miserable rich people – but it would meaningfully improve the lives of people around the world.”

Elsewhere in the podcast, the OpenAI CEO talked about how a guided experience with psychedelics — substances which he said he’s also “dabbled” with at Burning Man — changed his life for the better. He also revealed that he had decorated his private home office with items charting “the history of technology.”