OpenAI CEO Sam Altman argues that a generation of AI researchers held the field back by being overly confident that scaling large language models (LLMs) would not work, and he dismisses critics like Yann LeCun who call LLMs a dead end. Altman points to evidence such as an OpenAI model disproving a long-standing mathematical conjecture as proof that LLMs can generate new knowledge and have surpassed human intelligence in some areas. However, he acknowledges that LLMs still underperform humans on very long-horizon tasks requiring high-level judgment.
