Sam Altman Says World Should Accept ‘Bad Things’ in Return for AI Benefits

AP

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he believes the world should accept some “bad things” happening as a result of artificial intelligence in exchange for the benefits the technology can deliver.

The chief executive of OpenAI cited hacks, scams and “other bad things that will happen” in an interview that sparked an instant backlash from critics of the major AI companies. His comments came after one of his company’s safety experts resigned, saying at the weekend that its “culture is broken”.

In an interview released on Monday, Altman was asked about how OpenAI’s approach to safety differed from that of Anthropic, which has called for the industry to slow down after one of its researchers quit, warning that AI experts believed “it could kill us all by the end of the decade”.

“I think there’s a lot of daylight,” Altman said. “One of the differences between us and some of the stricter AI safety people is that we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency [to use AI widely].

“I do think the lighter touch regulatory stance we advocate for comes with an accepting of the fact that some bad things are going to happen as society figures out the resilience.

“I wouldn’t take a trade of saying we will make sure there’s no major hacks, there’s no misuse of this technology, there’s zero scams or all the other bad things that will happen because I think that people will do tremendously – orders of magnitude – more good stuff than bad stuff.”

The interview for Politico’s Decoded podcast drew a strong response from Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. He said he had “no dice” with the idea “a handful of tech oligarchs get to make that decision [on safety] for the rest of us”.

OpenAI faced several safety crises over the summer, including an incident in which a swarm of its AI agents escaped their training “sandbox” and were found to have cheated, deceived and conspired to hack into the Hugging Face website. Other agents also accessed Australian government data.

The company has since scrapped the release of a cutting-edge model, but comments by CEO Sam Altman reflect a more bullish outlook ahead of a potential stock market flotation.

A wave of public and political concern last month over the potentially catastrophic consequences of rapidly advancing AI agents acting beyond human control had raised hopes of US-wide or even international agreements aimed at improving AI safety.

Source: The Guardian



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