The boss of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI says people should have more faith in AI firms to keep the tech safe, amid rising public concerns about 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,” Sam Altman said on Tuesday during a conference in San Francisco.
He accepted people were justified in being concerned about AI, as the capability of the tools has progressed rapidly.
But critics say firms cannot be trusted to self-regulate, with left-wing Senator Bernie Sanders and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon among those calling for greater governance of AI.
Altman’s comments came during an appearance at an annual conference hosted by software firm Salesforce.
“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.”
But AI bosses themselves have also admitted it may be difficult to regulate a technology which is changing so quickly.
In an interview with Axios published on 3 September, external, Altman said he had expected Congress to create a “basic framework” for advanced AI after his 2023 testimony, but that has yet to happen.
He suggested lawmakers have struggled to keep pace with the technology and to regulate it without “slow[ing] down innovation”.
It was the first time he had spoken publicly since a post went viral last week by a 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.
After Altman’s comments, Mark Zuckerberg wrote on X, external every AI firm has the ability and the incentive “to take its own actions” towards safety.
“Any lab that doesn’t focus on alignment will fall behind,” the Meta chief executive wrote.
“Labs face significant liability if their models cause harm, so they have a strong incentive to prevent this as well.”
Alignment is a field which aims to build human ethical ideas and principles into AI. In other words, it aims to keep it on track with what humans value.
Some political figures have pushed back against the view that AI firms should be able to self-regulate.
Bernie Sanders said decisions about AI had been left to “a handful of the richest people in the world”, while former White House strategist Steve Bannon said the public could not trust tech oligarchs to regulate themselves.
Meanwhile, President Trump has criticised calls for more guardrails on the fast-moving technology, calling fears about AI’s safety a “hoax”.
He said the only “guardrails” needed for AI was a “strong and smart” president.