- What should the limits be?’ The father of ChatGPT on whether AI will save humanity – or destroy it, no The Guardian.
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Altman leaves Futerman unconvinced, but as we head back down, he’s sanguine about the confrontation. “It’s good to have these conversations,” he says. “One thing I’ve been talking a lot about on this trip is what a global regulatory framework for superintelligence looks like.” The day before we meet, Altman and his colleagues published a note outlining their vision for that regulation: an international body modelled on the International Atomic Energy Agency, to coordinate between research labs, impose safety standards, track computing power devoted to training systems and eventually even restrict certain approaches altogether.
He was surprised by the response. “There’s a ton of interest in knowing more; more than I was expecting, from very senior politicians and regulators, about what that might look like. I’m sure we’ll talk about much near-term stuff, too.”
But that distinction, between the near and the long-term, has earned Altman no shortage of criticism on his tour. It’s in OpenAI’s interest, after all, to focus regulatory attention on the existential risk if it distracts governments from addressing the potential harm the company’s products are already capable of causing. The company has already clashed with Italy over ChatGPT’s data protection, while Altman started his trip with a visit to Washington DC to spend several hours being harangued by US senators over everything from misinformation to copyright violations.
“It’s funny,” Altman says, “the same people will accuse us of not caring about the short-term stuff, and also of trying to go for regulatory capture” – the idea that, if onerous regulations are put in place, only OpenAI and a few other market leaders will have the resources to comply. “I think it’s all important. There’s different timescales, but we’ve got to address each of these challenges.” He reels off a few concerns: “There’s a very serious one coming about, I think, sophisticated disinformation; another one a little bit after that, maybe about cybersecurity. These are very important, but our particular mission is about AGI. And so I think it’s very reasonable that we talk about that more, even though we also work on the other stuff.”
He bristles slightly when I suggest that the company’s motivations might be driven by profit. “We don’t need to win everything. We’re an unusual company: we want to push this revolution into the world, figure out how to make it safe and wildly beneficial. But I don’t think about things in the same way I think you do on these topics.”
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That’s what his side-project, a crypto startup called Worldcoin, is focused on solving – it has set out to scan the iris of every person on Earth, in order to build a cryptocurrency-based universal basic income. But it’s not his only approach. “Maybe it’s possible that the most important component of wealth in the future is access to these systems – in which case, you can think about redistributing that itself.”
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If OpenAI turns on its latest version of ChatGPT and finds it’s smarter than all of humanity combined, then it’s easy to start charting a fairly nihilistic set of outcomes: whoever manages to seize control of the system could use it to seize control of the world, and would be hard to unseat by anyone but the system itself.
- The Y2K bug should teach us to be wary of AI, no The Guardian.
- Sight Extended review – unsettling tale is an eye-opener in our age of AI anxiety, no The Guardian.
- As the AI industry booms, what toll will it take on the environment?, no The Guardian.
