Sam Altman thinks AI will surpass human intelligence by 2030. His rival AI billionaires say it’ll be even sooner

Sam Altman has made possible his boldest prediction yet about when AI will surpass human intelligence. Altman, always the AI optimist, has previously touted AI’s potential to someday outthink humans, but the technology’s past years of progress since Open AI kicked off the AI arms race with Chat GPT’s release have shown him this moment could come sooner rather than later. “I would certainly say that by the end of this decade, by 2030, if we don’t have extraordinarily capable models that do things that we ourselves cannot do, I’d be very surprised,” he said in an interview with German newspaper Die Welt in late 2025. The future looks even more optimistic, Altman added. While AI may still not be able to do some things humans can do easily, models developed as soon as this year could be “quite surprising,” and progress rapidly, Altman said. “I can easily imagine a world where 30% to 40% of the tasks that happen in the economy today get done by AI in the not very distant future,” he said. Altman’s prediction is slightly less optimistic than that of other AI researchers and CEOs who have said the tech will make significant progress in just a couple of years. Former OpenAI employee and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei stands out for his belief that AI will beat out humans “in almost everything” by 2027. Newly minted trillionaire Elon Musk, who is known for his rosy predictions, said in a video just after SpaceX’s IPO this month that AI and robots will create so many goods that, “money will stop being relevant at some point in the future,” he said. Yet Altman noted that humans, despite the capacity of high-powered technology, will always care about what other humans are doing. “I think these qualities will be increasingly important in the world of AI,” he said. “We’ll have an incredible tool at our disposal, but we still have to figure out what to do, what other people want, and what other people will find useful.” Pushing the limits To be sure, as the fifth most