OpenAI boss Sam Altman thinks people should have more faith in his company and others like it to do the right thing when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI) development amid rising public concerns about all the risks.
“The world should trust that we are going to do the right thing because it’s the right thing and we feel the magnitude of this,” Altman said on Tuesday during a conference in San Francisco.
However, Altman noted that people were justified in their fears around AI, as the capability of the tools has progressed rapidly.
“It doesn’t take as much imagination as it used to for [us] to imagine how this could go wrong,” he said. “I think the world is right to be afraid of this.”
Altman’s comments came during an appearance at an annual conference hosted by Salesforce.
It was the first time he had spoken publicly since a post went viral last week from an artificial intelligence researcher who quit the AI firm Anthropic. The researcher claimed AI could kill all humans by the end of the decade if left unchecked.
A handful of other AI executives and experts responded by saying they agreed with the assessment, though they didn’t explain how they came to their conclusions or how exactly AI could accomplish such a thing.
The fervor over the claims has led to more scrutiny of AI development in recent days, and in response, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei called for the pace of all AI development to slow, external and urged governments to regulate the industry.
The post was applauded by Altman, as well as co-founder of Google’s DeepMind Demis Hassabis, and Elon Musk, owner of social media site X and AI assistant Grok.
But, some industry figures have also argued the fears were overblown and were being jumped on to generate hype for the industry.
During the conference, Altman addressed a crowd of hundreds of business people, telling them they should use AI tools to aid in their work, but also needed them in order to protect their businesses from potentially AI-enabled cyber attacks.
With no real AI regulation on the horizon in the US, Altman said Tuesday that he felt AI companies like his own were capable of essentially regulating themselves.
“We will get it right, I’m very confident in our company’s and industry’s ability to do this safely,” Altman said, adding that he was sure that they would “keep alignment and safety way ahead of capabilities” and if they couldn’t, they would “slow down or stop”.
Jensen Huang, head of Nvidia, also said at the same conference that the AI firms should decide if new versions of the technology should be released and not be managed by outside forces.
“We don’t need new laws or regulations,” Huang said, adding that there should not be a “false choice” between the speed of innovation and the safety of AI products.
Nvidia is the biggest company in the world by valuation, with its profits having boomed as a result of rampant demand for the AI computing chips it makes.
“Safety is paramount. However, safety is an engineering problem,” Huang said.
He added that if at any time a leader of an AI company lacks confidence in their product they should choose to not release it.
“That’s a very obvious thing to do,” Huang said. “Run as fast as you can, but if at any time you feel the institution is not in control, take a pause.”
The idea of AI executives being left to entirely regulate themselves has struck some in the industry as a bad idea.
Jack Clark, an Anthropic executive and co-founder, told the BBC on Monday that leaving AI to be a “totally unregulated industry” was “rolling dice with immense risks”.
Patrick Hillman, the chief operating officer of Logical Intelligence, which is chaired by Yann LeCun, a sage of the AI industry, noted Tuesday how little faith people have in tech companies to do anything truly in the public interest, external.
“The only institution that Americans might trust less than Washington these days is Silicon Valley. I have worked and lived in both and I assure you both have earned this scepticism,” Hillman said.
“If you believe what you are building is dangerous, show us what you are prepared to stop doing,” he added.
