The boss of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Sam Altman, says people should have greater faith in AI companies to keep the technology safe, while acknowledging that public concerns about its risks are justified.
Speaking at an annual conference hosted by software firm Salesforce in San Francisco on Tuesday, Altman said AI had advanced rapidly and its potential risks were becoming easier to imagine.
“The world should trust that we are going to do the right thing because it’s the right thing and we feel the magnitude of this,” Altman said.
He added: “It doesn’t take as much imagination as it used to for [us] to imagine how this could go wrong. I think the world is right to be afraid of this.”
Altman’s comments come as debate grows over whether AI companies should be allowed to regulate themselves or face greater government oversight.
Critics of self-regulation include US Senator Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon, a former adviser to President Donald Trump.
Sanders said decisions about AI had been left to “a handful of the richest people in the world”, while Bannon said the public could not trust technology executives to regulate themselves.
Trump has also criticised calls for stronger guardrails on AI, describing fears about the technology’s safety as a “hoax”. He said the only “guardrails” needed were a “strong and smart” president.
Altman has previously acknowledged the difficulty of regulating a technology developing at speed. In an interview with Axios published on 3 September, he said he had expected Congress to create a “basic framework” for advanced AI following his 2023 testimony.
He said lawmakers had struggled to keep pace with the technology while avoiding measures that could “slow[ing] down innovation”.
New AI safety legislation is unlikely to emerge from Congress soon, with lawmakers divided over how regulation should work. The House is also due to begin another recess at the end of the week ahead of the midterm elections in November.
Altman’s remarks came after a post by a researcher who left AI firm Anthropic went viral last week. The researcher claimed AI could “kill all humans” by the end of the decade if left unchecked.
Several AI executives and experts said they agreed with the assessment, although they did not explain how they reached their conclusions or how AI could cause such an outcome.
Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg later wrote on X that AI companies had both the ability and incentive “to take its own actions” on safety.
“Any lab that doesn’t focus on alignment will fall behind,” Zuckerberg wrote.
“Labs face significant liability if their models cause harm, so they have a strong incentive to prevent this as well.”
Alignment refers to efforts to ensure AI systems operate according to human values, principles and objectives.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, who also spoke at the Salesforce conference, said AI companies should decide whether new versions of the technology should be released rather than having those decisions made by external bodies.
“We don’t need new laws or regulations,” Huang said, adding there should not be a “false choice” between the speed of innovation and the safety of AI products.
Huang also described safety as an “engineering problem” and said companies should “take a pause” if they lose confidence in a product.
Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has called for the pace of AI development to slow and for governments to regulate the industry. His position was supported by Altman, Google’s DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis and Elon Musk.
However, more AI leaders were backing self-regulation rather than greater government involvement at Tuesday’s conference.
Altman said AI companies were capable of regulating themselves.
“We will get it right,” Altman said, adding that if firms could not keep “alignment and safety way ahead of capabilities” they would “slow down or stop”.
Yoshua Bengio, one of the pioneers of modern AI, disagreed with the idea that companies alone should manage the risks.
He said “ambitious efforts outside the for-profit sector” were needed to “avert the worst risks from AI”.
Some industry figures have also argued that renewed fears about AI are exaggerated and could be contributing to hype around the technology.
During the conference, Altman encouraged hundreds of business leaders to use AI tools in their work while warning that businesses also need the technology to protect themselves against potentially AI-enabled cyber attacks.
Jack Clark, an Anthropic executive and co-founder, told the BBC on Monday that leaving AI as a “totally unregulated industry” amounted to “rolling dice with immense risks”.
Patrick Hillman, chief operating officer of Logical Intelligence, also questioned the level of public trust in technology companies.
“The only institution that Americans might trust less than Washington these days is Silicon Valley. I have worked and lived in both and I assure you both have earned this scepticism,” Hillman said.
“If you believe what you are building is dangerous, show us what you are prepared to stop doing,” he added.
OpenAI and Anthropic leaders have said they have recently begun working towards an industry-wide agreement on AI safety.
Faridah Abdulkadiri
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