Sam Altman publishes “The Intelligence Age”
Superintelligence possibly ‘in a few thousand days’
Confirmed
The takeaway
On Sept 23, 2024 OpenAI CEO Sam Altman published “The Intelligence Age” on a standalone site.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- Published Sept 23, 2024 at ia.samaltman.com
- Key line: ‘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’
- Thesis: ‘deep learning worked’, getting predictably better with scale
- Warns that without enough infrastructure AI will become a limited resource that wars get fought over and a tool mostly for the rich
What happened
Published two weeks after o1, the essay was Altman’s first explicit public timeline for superintelligence.
Why it matters
It began a series of Altman essays (Three Observations, The Gentle Singularity) that shaped how the industry described its own trajectory, leading to his July 2026 remark that ‘we are now, like, in the singularity’.
Sources
1 source from 1 site. Numbers match the chips in the text.
1 source: 1 primary
Primary
- Sam Altman: The Intelligence Ageia.samaltman.com, official
Changes
- Filed (primary source checked)