Imagine the Uranium Committee of early 40's, where Szilard and others were babbling about 10kg of some magical metal exploding briefly with the power of a sun, with the best evidence being some funky trail in an alcohol vapor chamber.
Maybe sama is right, maybe not, but the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Unless the human brain is made of some sacred substance, the worst-case scenario is that we will extrapolate current scanning methods into the future and run the scanned model in silica. I'm not recommending this "just for fun," but the laws of physics don't forbid it.
So is Sam Altman the modern day alchemist? Making predictions based on faulty methods and faulty understanding (per your gold example)?
What will happen is that we'll shift the economy around based on inflated tech promises and ruin people's lives. No big deal I guess.
Alchemists were early scientists who later branched into fields like chemistry, mathematics, and physics (Newton explored alchemy).
Altman leads a team of experts in neural networks, programming, and HW design. While he might be mistaken, dismissing him outright is difficult.
When we are successfully turning base metals into gold, hit me up.
"Deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems."
"It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!)"
Technically a few thousand days covers quite a range. 20 thousand is 55 years.
On the Kurzweil graph, extrapolating hardware progress from 1900 through 2000, superintelligence seems to be roughly 2035, depending on how you define things. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Kurzweils-8-71-chart-of-...
And here we are today where nuclear energy is limited to nuclear weapons, a small set of military vehicles and <10% of the world's electricity production. Not nothing, sure, but nothing like past predictions either.
The toothpaste and similar products were pretty ill advised, vaseline and uranium glass are still collectable and are seeing a ressurrence of new interest: https://old.reddit.com/r/uraniumglass/