Artificial intelligence has come a long way since OpenAI introduced the world to ChatGPT 3.5 in late 2022.

The release of the large language model sets the stage for an AI revolution that the world is still trying to understand.

AI has many more uses than running large language models (LLMs), and the business world is already using the advanced technology to transform e-commerce (like when Amazon uses AI to recommend products), automotive navigation (AI underpins the autonomous technology most car companies use), robotics, and image generation.

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ChatGPT, specifically, has been especially disruptive to education.

Enterprising students have used ChatGPT to enhance their studies and reduce research time, while other students have just used the technology to cheat.

But OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman says children born today will never be able to surpass the “intelligence” of his products.

Sam Altman thinks children in the future will “feel bad” for us

Sam Altman believes we are living in a technological Stone Age that will have future generations snickering at how bad we had it.

“A kid born today will never be smarter than AI, ever. And a kid born today, by the time that kid kind of understands the way the world works, will just always be used to an incredibly fast rate of things improving and discovering new science,” Altman said in a recent interview floating around on social media.

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“They will never know any other world. It will seem totally natural. It will seem unthinkable and stone-age-like that we used to use computers or phones or any kind of technology that was not way smarter than we were.”

The citizens of his mythical future will eventually pity us lowly non-AI users.

“We will think like, ‘how bad those people of the 2020s had it,'” Altman added.

Here’s what the science says about Sam Altman’s AI prediction

The beauty of Altman’s prediction is that he can be proven right in multiple ways.

The tech could become so advanced and helpful that humans literally can’t live without it, or children could become so slavish to LLMs like ChatGPT in the future that they become reliant on it to perform the simplest tasks.

Last year, Turnitin’s AI detection tool scanned over 200 million writing assignments and detected AI use in one in 10 assignments.

However, only three out of every 100 assignments were primarily generated by AI.

“We hit a steady state, and it hasn’t changed dramatically since then,” said Turnitin Chief Product Officer Annie Chechitelli. “There are students who are leaning on AI too much. But it’s not pervasive. It wasn’t this, ‘The sky is falling.’”

But Altman expects AI adoption to only increase in the near future, so the number of students using the tech to cheat will likely also increase.

AI is helpful for a lot of students, but there’s a dark side

Harvard Graduate School of Education recently published a report on the use of AI by teens and young adult students.

When asked what they wanted adults to know about AI, the kids said that AI is not just used to cheat, but is also helpful for finding answers to unasked questions.

But 41% of the kids today (not the ones in Altman’s future) said they are “acutely aware” of the potential issues with generative AI.

“Across demographics, those surveyed also expressed fears about AI’s impact on their future job markets, especially the creative pursuits they mentioned above. They also highlighted potential privacy concerns, and generative AI’s use to create and spread misinformation and disinformation,” the report said.

So it appears Sam Altman and company have some work to do to create the future they seem to believe is inevitable.

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