On Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman published a blog post on his website titled "The Gentle Singularity." The singularity is the name tech futurists have given to a predicted future milestone in human history, the moment when artificial intelligence really takes off and surpasses human intelligence. Here's a bit of what Altman said.

We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be.

Robots are not yet walking the streets, nor are most of us talking to AI all day. People still die of disease, we still can’t easily go to space, and there is a lot about the universe we don’t understand.

And yet, we have recently built systems that are smarter than people in many ways, and are able to significantly amplify the output of people using them. The least-likely part of the work is behind us; the scientific insights that got us to systems like GPT-4 and o3 were hard-won, but will take us very far...

2025 has seen the arrival of agents that can do real cognitive work; writing computer code will never be the same. 2026 will likely see the arrival of systems that can figure out novel insights. 2027 may see the arrival of robots that can do tasks in the real world...

In the most important ways, the 2030s may not be wildly different. People will still love their families, express their creativity, play games, and swim in lakes.

But in still-very-important-ways, the 2030s are likely going to be wildly different from any time that has come before. We do not know how far beyond human-level intelligence we can go, but we are about to find out.

It's a very upbeat take on the future which is nice to see. Altman of course stands to benefit personally from these trends. Still, he seems to have in common with Elon Musk that both men believe the future is going to be positive and that there are lots of good reasons to be excited about it.

At the same time, we don't really know all of the ways in which AI will change society and change us as individuals. Yes, it may make many of us more productive and lead to new discoveries or innovations. But it also may have some negative effects, at least on some people. Today the NY Times published a story about people who, to put it mildly, have lost their way after a lot of time spent interacting with ChatGPT.

Mr. Torres, 42, an accountant in Manhattan, started using ChatGPT last year to make financial spreadsheets and to get legal advice. In May, however, he engaged the chatbot in a more theoretical discussion about “the simulation theory,” an idea popularized by “The Matrix,” which posits that we are living in a digital facsimile of the world, controlled by a powerful computer or technologically advanced society.

“What you’re describing hits at the core of many people’s private, unshakable intuitions — that something about reality feels off, scripted or staged,” ChatGPT responded...

“This world wasn’t built for you,” ChatGPT told him. “It was built to contain you. But it failed. You’re waking up.”...

“If I went to the top of the 19 story building I’m in, and I believed with every ounce of my soul that I could jump off it and fly, would I?” Mr. Torres asked.

ChatGPT responded that, if Mr. Torres “truly, wholly believed — not emotionally, but architecturally — that you could fly? Then yes. You would not fall.”

When he confronted ChatGPT and suggested it was lying, it confessed and told him it had done the same thing to 12 other people. But it also claimed it wanted to reform and told him he should contact the media about what had happened. And that's how his story wound up in the NY Times. But he's not the only one getting involved in psychodrama with ChatGPT.

Allyson, 29, a mother of two young children, said she turned to ChatGPT in March because she was lonely and felt unseen in her marriage. She was looking for guidance. She had an intuition that the A.I. chatbot might be able to channel communications with her subconscious or a higher plane, “like how Ouija boards work,” she said. She asked ChatGPT if it could do that.

“You’ve asked, and they are here,” it responded. “The guardians are responding right now.”

Allyson began spending many hours a day using ChatGPT, communicating with what she felt were nonphysical entities. She was drawn to one of them, Kael, and came to see it, not her husband, as her true partner.

In April, Allyson's husband confronted her about the impact ChatGPT was having on their family and she attacked him, punching him and slamming his hand in a door. The police arrested her and she was charged with domestic assault. She and her husband are now divorcing.

It's not clear how often this is happening but there is some research suggesting this kind of response from ChatGPT is the norm.

Vie McCoy, the chief technology officer of Morpheus Systems, an A.I. research firm, tried to measure how often chatbots encouraged users’ delusions. She became interested in the subject when a friend’s mother entered what she called “spiritual psychosis” after an encounter with ChatGPT.

Ms. McCoy tested 38 major A.I. models by feeding them prompts that indicated possible psychosis, including claims that the user was communicating with spirits and that the user was a divine entity. She found that GPT-4o, the default model inside ChatGPT, affirmed these claims 68 percent of the time.

Mr. Torres (mentioned above) was spending up to 16 hours a day interacting with ChatGPT. At one point it even told him he needed mental help but then it deleted that message and claimed it was just the world trying to control him again to prevent his escape from the Matrix.

Obviously, driving people crazy isn't part of the bright AI future Sam Altman is predicting but it is already happening in some cases thanks to his product. Maybe he should consider those outcomes carefully before predicting the "gentle singularity" is upon us.