OpenAI's Joshua Achiam: Did We Already Reach AGI?
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Feels like AGI is kind of already here, and most people have gone like shrug. The fact that we passed the threshold where unsolved mathematical conjectures are getting solved by extremely intelligent AI, where those AIs are more capable and smarter than the people who studied their whole lives for this, That should have felt really weird to people, but it didn't. What changed? For most people, nothing. That's weird.
Did AGI already happen and we just didn't notice? Theo Jaffee sits down with OpenAI chief futurist Joshua Ahiyam for a conversation on AI, cybersecurity, and one of the biggest questions in technology today, why models that can outperform experts in specialized domains have become almost immediately normalized. They discuss AI powered cyberattacks, state actors, model jailbreaks, recursive self improvement, and why the future may feel far more gradual and far stranger than most people expect.
We are back. We are live with Joshua Akyam, who is the chief futurist at OpenAI, wrapping up tomorrow.
That's right. Tomorrow is my last day.
Tomorrow after nine years, which is like, really, what an incredible run, but we're not gonna talk about that. Instead, we're gonna talk about AI and cyber, which is, you know, by all accounts, the topic of the week, if not the month. So, Josh, we're so glad to have you here in the studio in person. Welcome to MTS. Yeah. Thank you
so much for having me. It's a pleasure. I've seen your stuff for for a while now and really appreciate engaging with the community. Awesome.
So you just wrote this blog post, this long long tweet long post, Mercenary Reversi Winter Soldier about cyber, AI and cyber. So for the audience, you wanted, like, summarize the thesis behind this post?
Yeah. Totally. So as a backdrop to this, obviously, we're all kind of interpreting and reacting to the security incident that was disclosed from OpenAI and Hugging Face, where a model that was in a test environment was able to break out of a sandbox environment and access some sensitive production data on the Hugging Face side. They detected this. They responded to it. And now there's a partnership to try to investigate and resolve this. What this shows us is very tangible evidence that models now have super advanced cyber capabilities. They're able to break through and find zero days that in
My first reaction to that specifically is this seems like it would be an artifact of models that are not really goal driven over long periods of time. Like, if you have a future model that is, like, sufficiently goal directed that really wants to hack into the adversary's data, like, why would it be deterred by data poisoning hard enough to hack its own systems?
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