Sam Altman is an ambitious guy.
That’s a great attribute, but many of his grand plans involve technology that could have devastating effects on the world, and a handful of Senators called him in for a grilling session Tuesday to find out exactly what he’s up to.
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Altman has yet to become a household name, but he will. He’s the CEO of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and as much of the face of artificial intelligence as Elon Musk is the face of EV and Steve Jobs was the iconic legend behind cool tech gadgets.
Altman told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee that his greatest fear as he and his team drive AI capabilities at warp speed is that it causes significant harmful disruption for people. He also wasn’t sugar-coating the fact that there are far more serious consequences with AI than losing your job to a chatbot.
“My worst fears are that we cause significant — we, the field, the technology industry — cause significant harm to the world. I think that could happen in a lot of different ways. It’s why we started the company. I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong, and we want to be vocal about that. We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening.”
He was a little vague regarding details of worst-case scenarios regarding AI’s capabilities, but he seemed to imply he’s aware of them, saying, ”But we try to be very clear-eyed about what the downside case is and the work that we have to mitigate that.”
A lighter moment came when Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois made a point of saying how rare it is for companies to go in front of them and say. “Please regulate us.”
Much of the testimony was about the impact on jobs, and Altman warned the Senators many of their voters would be losing theirs. “There will be an impact on jobs. We try to be very clear about that, and I think it will require partnership between the industry and government but mostly action by government to figure out how we want to mitigate that. But I’m very optimistic about how great the jobs of the future will be.”
The elephant in the room was the topic of how AI can and almost certainly will be able to create fake campaign ads to sway people with false information heading into important elections. Altman told his audience that is going to happen, and it would be “quite wise” for them to pursue regulations sooner than later.
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