OpenAI chief Sam Altman has defined five levels of AI development that will lead to AGI. The first stage is chatbots, followed by reasoners, which the company says has now been achieved with o1. The next phases are agents, followed by innovators capable of scientific discovery and finally fully autonomous organisations.
In a recent podcast with YC chief Garry Tan, Altman said despite it being a great time for startup founders, the future of startups will likely be one person plus 10,000 GPUs, as we race towards the intelligence era. In the same podcast, YC’s Garry Tan described this as a pattern, where reaching level two mirrors level five, with self-correcting agents already collaborating like a micro-organisation.
This is in line with Altman’s previous thoughts on how AI tools will soon reach a point where they can replicate the entire output of human employees. “In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends there’s this betting pool for the first year there is a one-person billion-dollar company, which would’ve been unimaginable without AI. And now it will happen,” he said.
Others Weigh In
The question of ‘one person billion dollar startup’ is not new and was addressed by a16z founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz in their podcast before.
Andreessen noted that a trillion-dollar startup with just one person already exists — Bitcoin. This is attributed to the work of one pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. This positions Bitcoin as a prime example of a highly impactful project initiated by one individual.
Andreessen also said that companies that are not led by one person, like Instagram, achieved billions in sales with just 11 employees, and WhatsApp generated over $15 billion with only 50 employees. They both also talk about how the proliferation of advanced tools and outsourcing mechanisms may allow for more billion-dollar companies with minimal headcount, even if full automation isn’t yet possible.
More recently, industry veteran Vinod Khosla noted how all of this will transform the future of work, ultimately leading to the rise of the passion economy. He spoke about this inevitable shift in his essay ‘AI Dystopia or Utopia,’ where he highlighted how AI could make three-day workweeks a reality.
“With the right policies, we could smoothen the transition and even usher in a three-day workweek,” wrote Khosla, underlining how AI will fundamentally transform the way we work, albeit in a way that positively impacts all of humankind and the economy at large.
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