CEO Sam Altman celebrates '12 Days of OpenAI' as his company pursues advent of digital god
As Christians around the world prepared to celebrate the incarnation and birth of Christ, researchers at OpenAI prepared for the advent of a digital savior.
In the weeks leading up to Christmas, OpenAI celebrated what it called the “12 Days of OpenAI,” a play on the historic Christian tradition of celebrating the “12 Days of Christmas.”
Each day, OpenAI made special announcements, culminating in the unveiling of o3, OpenAI’s most advanced model yet.
In the video announcing the o3 model, ARC Prize Foundation President Greg Kamradt explained that o3 had far surpassed all other AI models when measured against performance benchmarks set by his organization.
Kamradt described the ARC Prize Foundation as “a non-profit with the mission of being a north star towards AGI through enduring benchmarks.”
In his interaction with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and OpenAI SVP of Research Mark Chen, Kamradt said the performance of o3 shifted the way he viewed the potential of AGI.
“When I look at these scores, I realize I need to switch my worldview a little bit,” Kamradt said. “I need to fix my AI intuitions about what AI can actually do and what it’s capable of, especially in this o3 world.”
While the “12 Days of Open AI” was presented as a light-hearted marketing campaign to inform the public of OpenAI’s newest developments, it takes on a different light when one considers the “worldview” that motivates the company’s work.
OpenAI believes its work will likely soon lead to the emergence of superintelligence, and that it has a responsibility to help transition humanity into this new age.
“Successfully transitioning to a world with superintelligence is perhaps the most important – and hopeful, and scary – project in human history,” Altman’s company OpenAI says on its website. “Success is far from guaranteed, and the stakes (boundless downside and boundless upside) will hopefully unite all of us.”
In an essay published this September, Altman said that “it is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days,” and that this will lead to “the discovery of all of physics” and “nearly-limitless intelligence and abundant energy.”
He further wrote that the emergence of superintelligence, being the culmination of a millennia-long process of technological progress, “may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far.”
For Christians, the most consequential fact of history is the incarnation of Christ, who came to unite God and man through his life, death, and resurrection.
Yet for Altman, the center of history is not God being born into the world of the Virgin Mary.
Rather, it is the “nearly limitless intelligence” of a digital god being born into the world through his corporation.
Jacob Leonard Rosenberg is an American-Israeli, an Evangelical Christian and the son of the founder of ALL ISRAEL NEWS. He writes about the intersection of science, technology, individual liberty and religious freedom.
