OpenAI CEO: It’s good that we are afraid of AI

Realizing the dangers and delights of his invention, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman gave an interview to ABC News in which he spoke about AI and recent addition of GPT-4.

In fact, Altman believes they need to be wary of something despite all its benefits.

He believes it comes with real dangers, but it could also be “the greatest technology humanity has ever developed” to radically improve our lives.

“This is where we need to be careful,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. “I think people should be happy that we’re a little afraid of it.”

In his interview, Altman emphasized that OpenAI needs regulators and the public to be as involved as possible with the release of ChatGPT, insisting that the feedback will help prevent potential negative impacts the technology could have on humanity. He added that he was in “constant contact” with government officials.

“I am particularly concerned that these models could be used for widespread disinformation,” Altman said. “Now that they’ve gotten better at writing computer code, [ellos] can be used for offensive cyberattacks.”

A common sci-fi fear that Altman doesn’t share: AI models that don’t need humans, make their own decisions and plot world domination.

“He’s waiting for someone to give him their opinion,” Altman said. “It’s a tool that is largely under human control.”

However, he said he feared what kind of people could control the situation. “There will be other people who won’t put in place some of the security restrictions that we put in place,” he added. “Society, I think, has a limited amount of time to figure out how to respond to this, how to regulate it, how to manage it.”

“What I’m trying to do the most is to warn people about what we call the ‘hallucination problem,'” Altman said. “The model will confidently state things as if they were completely fictional facts.”

“The right way to think about the models we create is as a reasoning engine, not a database of facts,” Altman said. “They can also act as a database of facts, but that’s not really what’s special about them, we want them to do something closer to the ability to reason rather than remember.”

“What worries me is that … we are not going to be the only creators of this technology,” Altman said. “There will be other people who won’t put some of the security restrictions we’ve put in place.”

One problem with the disruptive potential of this technology is job replacement. Altman says this is likely to replace some jobs in the near future, and he worries about how quickly that could happen.

“I think over a couple of generations, humanity has shown that it can perfectly adapt to major technological changes,” Altman said. “But if it happens in a single digit number of years, some of these changes… That’s what worries me the most.”