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🌿 How intelligent can AI get?

🌿 How intelligent can AI get?

A look at AGI and superintelligence, and what they mean for moms

Ruqaiya
January 09, 2025

In partnership with

Sam Altman is kind of like the Beyoncé of the AI world.

Hopefully, the real Beyoncé doesn’t mind the comparison (in case she’s reading this).

Altman is the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, which builds the GPT AI models and the ChatGPT application we all know and love (or love to hate). Whenever he tweets on X or posts a blog, the AI world acts like he dropped a hit single.

This past Sunday, he dropped his latest banger, a 1200-word blog post titled Reflections. In it, he mentions the acronym AGI a lot:

“As we get closer to AGI, it feels like an important time to look at the progress of our company.”

“We started OpenAI almost nine years ago because we believed that AGI was possible, and that it could be the most impactful technology in human history.”

“I appreciate the way so many people worked together to build a stronger system of governance for OpenAI that enables us to pursue our mission of ensuring that AGI benefits all of humanity.”

“We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it.”

Sam Altman

Even though Altman is being very ✨ mindful ✨ and ✨ demure ✨ about it, it’s clear ‘AGI’ is going to be life-changing, and it’s going to be here relatively soon.

He then starts talking about something seemingly more intense: superintelligence.

We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.

Sam Altman

This blog post gave me more questions than answers:

What exactly are AGI and superintelligence?
When can we expect them, and what can we expect from them?
What do they mean for Ammis and our families? Are they as amazing as Altman says?

For today’s letter, I hunted down some answers and I’m sharing them with you!

Today, you’ll discover

Your new AI notebook
A look into AGI and superintelligence, aka SUPER smart AI
An AI sleep coach + more!

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An AI Notebook

Today’s apple: NotebookLM

NotebookLM is an AI Notebook built by Google, and powered by their Gemini 2.0 model. I use it as an AI-powered research tool, but unlike AI-powered search (think Perplexity), which scours the web for answers, NotebookLM only provides answers and insights from links, videos, documents, and PDFs you provide.

For example, upload your kids' school calendar, Parent Handbook, and event flyers to NotebookLM. Then you can ask, "When's the next holiday?" or "What's the birthday treat policy?" You'll get answers from the documents you provided.

There are dozens of ways this should help in work and life, but that's it from me for now - I just wanted to share this time-saving gem as we kick off 2025.

How ‘intelligent’ will AI get?

Today’s topic: AGI & superintelligence, explained.

🧠 What are AGI and superintelligence?

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and superintelligence are advanced forms of AI that go far beyond what we use today.

AGI would be AI that can match human intelligence across all kinds of tasks - not just one specific job like today's AI. You might have heard of the Turing Test - it's a famous way to check if AI can think like humans by seeing if it can fool people into thinking they're chatting with a real person.

But AGI would need to go way beyond just good conversation - it would need to actually think and solve problems like humans do. Superintelligence takes this even further - it would be AI that's smarter than humans at virtually everything.

Altman believes they can achieve AGI within Donald Trump’s term and superintelligence a few thousand days after that (aka within the next decade or two) 🤯

💡 What will AGI and Superintelligence be capable of?

These technologies could transform our world in major ways:

They could speed up scientific discoveries, potentially finding cures for diseases or solutions to climate change much faster than we can.
They could completely change how we work by automating even complex jobs that only humans can do today.
They might solve huge global problems like poverty or resource scarcity with solutions we haven't even thought of yet.
They could advance technology so rapidly that our current devices would seem as outdated as palm pilots (remember those?).

But without proper guardrails and oversight, AGI and superintelligence could be catastrophic. In OpenAI’s own words:

Superintelligence will be the most impactful technology humanity has ever invented, and could help us solve many of the world’s most important problems. But the vast power of superintelligence could also be very dangerous, and could lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction.

👩‍👧 What Should We Be Mindful of as Mothers?

I know I left you on a downer with the whole human extinction thing.

I admit that I am concerned (understatement) about AGI and superintelligence being developed so rapidly without any regulations in place or seemingly any official oversight.

This technology will co-exist with my kids throughout their lives, so as an Ammi, I have to make sure we definitely don’t go down the ‘human extinction’ route.

I’m currently addressing that by telling all the Ammis I know about AGI and superintelligence. Altman is no match for a bunch of riled-up Ammis.

But, if I try to see the glass half full, it would be nice to see a better world for my kids, thanks to all the magical, mystical solutions AGI and superintelligence could provide.

Either way, in the AI age, I think fostering your children’s humanity is the best way to go: feel your feelings, feel for others, enjoy your five senses, laugh hard, and be curious.