Sam Altman is attempting to make a name for himself in the artificial intelligence market by founding the World Tour

Artificial Intelligence, Safety and the Economy: A Conversation with OpenAI CEO Steve Stewart (Pastman, Naked Observations, Dec. 2010)

Stewart said that he left the conversation a little more worried than before. “I don’t know what information he has that makes him think that will work.”

Can he persuade this group? Stewart says the OpenAI CEO came out to talk to the protestors after his time onstage but wasn’t able to change Stewart’s mind. He said they talked for a short time about the Openai approach to safety and how it involves combining the capabilities of both artificial intelligence and safety systems.

“We have a lot of ideas that we’ve published about how we think alignment of superintelligent systems works, but I believe that is a technically solvable problem,” said Altman. “And I feel more confident in that answer now than I did a few years ago. I hope we don’t go down some paths that aren’t very good. I am pretty happy with the trajectory things are currently on.

“My basic model of the world is that the cost of intelligence and the cost of energy are the two limited inputs, sort of the two limiting reagents of the world. He said it does more to help poor people than rich people if you can make those more accessible. The technology will lift the world up.

Speaking to a packed auditorium of close to 1,000 people, Altman seemed unphased. Wearing a sharp blue suit with green patterned socks, he talked in clipped answers, always to the point. He explained that he thinks the economy could be rejuvenated with the help of Artificial Intelligence. “I’m excited that this technology can bring the missing productivity gains of the last few decades back,” he said. He admitted that he was worried about how generative AI could be used to spread misinformation.

According to OpenAI’s critics, this talk of regulating superintelligence, otherwise known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is a rhetorical feint — a way for Altman to pull attention away from the current harms of AI systems and keep lawmakers and the public distracted with sci-fi scenarios.

“On the other hand,” he said, “I think most people would agree that if someone does crack the code and build a superintelligence — however you want to define that — [then] some global rules on that are appropriate … I’d like to make sure we treat this at least as seriously as we treat, say, nuclear material; for the megascale systems that could give birth to superintelligence.”

“Look, maybe he’s selling a grift. I sure as hell hope he is,” one of the protestors, Gideon Futerman, a student at Oxford University studying solar geoengineering and existential risk, said of Altman. He is hyping up systems with known harms. We should probably stop them before they commit a crime. And if he’s right and he’s building systems which are generally intelligent, then the dangers are far, far, far bigger.”

Hundreds of people waited in a queue to get into University College London to watch Openai CEO Sam Altman speak. People waiting in the sun talked about the company, while a group of protesters stood in front of the entrance doors and said that companies like Openai need to stop developing advanced artificial intelligence before they harm humanity.

It’s important that artificial intelligence is kept out of harms way while the technology continues to evolve, according to Altman. The European Parliament is currently debating legislation called the AI Act, new rules that would shape the way companies can develop such models and might create an AI office to oversee compliance. The UK, however, has decided to spread responsibility for AI between different regulators, including those covering human rights, health and safety, and competition, instead of creating a dedicated oversight body.