During a $250,000-per-plate AI innovation dinner in Davos, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman unveiled his most ambitious prediction yet: by 2026, artificial intelligence will solve problems humanity hasn't even thought to create.
"Look at quantum metaphysics. We don't understand it, but our AI will solve it," Altman explained to a room of nodding venture capitalists while gesturing with a gold-plated fork. This came moments after OpenAI's chatbot incorrectly identified a dinner roll as "possibly a small dog or a large asteroid."
The presentation, delivered between courses of carbon-neutral wagyu beef, included a detailed timeline of future breakthroughs. By Q2 2025, OpenAI will solve "post-quantum blockchain smart refrigerators." By Q4 2025, they'll tackle "meta-metaverse entropy." And by Q1 2026 - exactly 18 months from now, as it has been for the past two years - they'll resolve "hyper-quantum consciousness paradoxes that haven't been theorized yet."
The company has already burned through $2.3 billion researching solutions to the upcoming alpaca-blockchain crisis, while their current AI still struggles to distinguish between basic farm animals. This hasn't deterred investors like venture capitalist Thomas Whitmore, who enthusiastically committed $500 million to fund what he calls "pre-problems."
"Sure, their chatbot can't reliably add two numbers together," Whitmore explained, "but imagine the returns when they solve problems we haven't even invented yet!"
OpenAI announced a new research division dedicated to "solving problems that will only become problems after we solve our current unsolved problems," with a modest budget of just $4 billion. When asked about their current challenges with basic image recognition, Altman remained upbeat. "That's not the point. The point is that it will soon solve problems so complex we can't even imagine them yet."
The dinner concluded with Altman announcing a new $50 billion funding round to develop solutions for "future future problems," which he described as "problems that will only become problems after we solve the future problems we don't have yet."
