Philosopher Nick Bostrom defines a superintelligence as any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest. This definition distinguishes such an agent from current artificial intelligence systems that excel at specific tasks but lack general reasoning capabilities.
I.J. Good first proposed the intelligence explosion concept in 1965 describing how artificial intelligence could rapidly improve its own intelligence leading to superintelligence. This scenario presents the control problem regarding creating beneficial systems while avoiding harmful unintended consequences.
OpenAI leaders Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever published governance recommendations in 2023 predicting superintelligence might arrive in less than ten years. Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI in 2024 to cofound Safe Superintelligence valued at thirty billion dollars by February 2025 despite offering no product yet.
Microprocessors operate at roughly two gigahertz versus neurons firing around two hundred hertz which means electronic components operate seven orders of magnitude faster than their biological counterparts. These speed differences provide computational advantages including multitasking that lets machines perform multiple simultaneous operations impossible for biological entities.
The AI@50 conference took place in 2006 when eighteen percent of attendees predicted machines would simulate learning and every other aspect of human intelligence by 2056. Survey data from May 2013 involving the hundred most cited authors in artificial intelligence showed median expectations for machine proficiency matching typical humans at 2024 with ten percent confidence.