Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, has published a new essay titled “The Gentle Singularity,” arguing that the world may already have entered an era in which artificial intelligence exceeds human capabilities, a point he likens to passing an “event horizon.” Altman says ChatGPT is "already more powerful than any human who has ever lived" in certain respects and predicts the system will generate “novel insights” within the next year. He calls for solving the AI alignment problem before making super-intelligence inexpensive and widely available. The comments accompany eye-catching growth figures for OpenAI’s flagship product. The chatbot, launched 925 days ago, is estimated to command roughly 80 % of the generative-AI market and about 78 % of global traffic, with executives saying it could ultimately reach billions of users as the company seeks to replicate Google’s early dominance of web search. Rapid adoption has tested the platform’s infrastructure. On 11 June the service suffered a global outage lasting more than 10 hours, leaving thousands of users unable to submit queries; OpenAI attributed the disruption to an overload of simultaneous requests. OpenAI also disclosed that it had disrupted several state-sponsored efforts to exploit ChatGPT for malware creation and espionage, underscoring the security challenges that accompany the technology’s accelerating capabilities.