On Sunday OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman published a blog post titled Reflections about his company’s progress—and the speed bumps along the way—during its first nine years. Altman’s words are important because OpenAI has a very good chance of being first to reach AGI, or artificial general intelligence (machines that are generally as smart or smarter than humans), then progressing on toward superintelligent systems (which are far smarter than humans). And these systems, when applied in the real world, could affect all of us in profound ways. Altman’s comments, however, might illuminate this transition a bit more with some added context.

First off, the blog post was spurred by an interview Altman recently did with Bloomberg. According to Bloomberg, the OpenAI PR team suggested an interview in which Altman would “review the past two years, reflect on some events and decisions, to clarify a few things.”

Altman appears to refer to the new o1 model and o3 models, which take a different approach to intelligence........

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