back

Sam Altman Predicts AI Will Surpass Human Intelligence by 2030 as OpenAI Tests ChatGPT Against Humans in 44 Occupations

Get SIGNAL/NOISE in your inbox daily

AI News Digest – September 27, 2025

Must Read Stories (9.0-9.9)

Sam Altman predicts AI will surpass human intelligence by 2030

Business Insider | Score: 9.8

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has made his boldest prediction yet, stating that artificial general intelligence (AGI) will surpass human intelligence by 2030. This timeline represents a significant acceleration from previous industry estimates.

• Altman believes we’re closer to AGI than most experts previously thought, with major breakthroughs expected within 5 years

• The prediction comes amid OpenAI’s rapid advancement in language models and reasoning capabilities

• This timeline could reshape investment strategies, regulatory discussions, and workforce planning across all industries

Key follow-up questions: What specific technical milestones does Altman see as necessary for AGI? How might this timeline affect OpenAI’s competition with Google DeepMind and Anthropic? What safety measures are being implemented for such rapid AGI development?

OpenAI testing ChatGPT against humans in 44 occupations

Tom’s Guide | Score: 9.7

OpenAI has launched comprehensive testing of ChatGPT’s capabilities against human professionals across 44 different occupations, from lawyers and software developers to registered nurses, marking the most extensive job-performance comparison study to date.

• The testing spans white-collar professions including legal, medical, engineering, and creative fields

• Results will likely influence how companies deploy AI tools and restructure workflows

• This data could become crucial evidence in ongoing debates about AI’s impact on employment

Key follow-up questions: What specific metrics are being used to compare AI versus human performance? Will these results be made public to inform policy decisions? How might unions and professional organizations respond to these findings?

Jobs crisis warning from AI leaders

Axios | Score: 9.6

A growing chorus of AI leaders and economists are warning of an impending jobs crisis as AI capabilities rapidly advance, with Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei among those sounding the alarm about workforce displacement happening faster than anticipated.

• Economic disruption from AI may occur more rapidly than historical technological transitions

• Current retraining programs and safety nets may be inadequate for the scale of change ahead

• Policy makers are being urged to act preemptively rather than reactively to workforce displacement

Key follow-up questions: What specific AI capabilities are driving this accelerated timeline? Are there particular industries or job categories most at risk? What policy interventions are being recommended to address this crisis?

DeepMind unveils Gemini Robotics 1.5

Robotics and Automation News | Score: 9.4

Google DeepMind has announced Gemini Robotics 1.5, a major advancement designed to bring AI agents into the physical world with unprecedented capability and safety features.

• The system combines DeepMind’s multimodal AI with advanced robotics control for real-world applications

• Focus on safety and reliability makes it suitable for deployment in human environments

• Represents a significant step toward general-purpose robots that can understand and interact with complex physical environments

Notable Developments (7.0-8.9)

Microsoft’s AI agents gain enterprise traction

Early enterprise deployments of Microsoft’s AI agents are showing promising results in automating complex business processes, with several Fortune 500 companies reporting significant efficiency gains in customer service and data analysis workflows.

Meta expands AI training compute by 40%

Meta announced a massive expansion of its AI training infrastructure, adding 40% more compute capacity to support development of next-generation large language models and multi

Past Briefings

Feb 24, 2026

OpenAI Deleted ‘Safely.’ NVIDIA Reports. Karpathy Is Still Learning

THE NUMBER: 6 — times OpenAI changed its mission in 9 years. The most recent edit deleted one word: safely. TL;DR Andrej Karpathy — the engineer who wrote the curriculum that trained a generation of developers, ran AI at Tesla, and helped found OpenAI — posted in December that he's never felt so behind as a programmer. Fourteen million people saw it. Tonight, NVIDIA reports Q4 fiscal 2026 earnings after market close: analysts expect $65.7 billion in revenue, up 67% year over year. The numbers will almost certainly land. What matters is what Jensen Huang says about the next two quarters to...

Feb 23, 2026

Altman lied about a handshake on camera. CrowdStrike fell 8%. Google just killed the $3,000 photo shoot.

Sam Altman told reporters he was "confused" when Narendra Modi grabbed his hand at the India AI Impact Summit. He said he "wasn't sure what was happening." The video, which has been watched by tens of millions of people, shows Altman looking directly at Dario Amodei before raising his fist. He knew exactly what was happening. He chose not to do it, and then he lied about it. On camera. In multiple interviews. With the footage playing on every screen behind him. That would be a minor character note in any other industry. In this one, it isn't. Because on...

Feb 20, 2026

We’re Building the Agentic Web Faster Than We’re Protecting It

Google's WebMCP gives agents structured access to every website. Anthropic's data shows autonomy doubling with oversight thinning. OpenAI's agent already drains crypto vaults. Google shipped working code Thursday that hands AI agents a structured key to every website on the internet. WebMCP, running in Chrome 146 Canary, lets sites expose machine-readable "Tool Contracts" so agents can book a flight, file a support ticket, or complete a checkout without parsing screenshots or scraping HTML. Early benchmarks show 67% less compute overhead than visual approaches. Microsoft co-authored the spec. The W3C is incubating it. This isn't a proposal. It's production software already...