ChatGPT boss Sam Altman has said that people are ‘justified ‘right’ to feel afraid of artificial intelligence, but he urged people to trust AI companies to ‘do the right thing’.
The 41-year-old OpenAI CEO has made headlines in recent weeks after former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned that AI ‘could kill us all by the end of the decade’.
Responding to Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei’s comments about how ‘frontier’ AI needs to slow down, Altman agreed before outlining the two ways the technology could ‘go very badly’.
Now, however, Altman has acknowledged that the public is right to be worried about AI, but companies such as OpenAI could keep the technology safe.
Speaking at a conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Altman said: ‘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.’
But Altman also admitted that it was becoming easier to imagine how AI could go badly wrong.
‘It doesn’t take as much imagination as it used to for [us] to imagine how this could go wrong,’ he continued.
‘I think the world is right to be afraid of this.’
Since Coxon’s comments, the debate over AI has intensified in recent weeks.
Backing Amodei’s call for caution, Altman also said at the conference: ‘We will get it right, I’m very confident in our company’s and industry’s ability to do this safely.’
Independent Senator Bernie Sanders has called for greater public control over AI, arguing that decisions about the technology should not be left to a small group of wealthy tech leaders.
‘The people of this country must make the decisions about AI, and not just a handful of oligarchs,’ Sanders said at a conference in Washington.
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon also questioned whether the tech industry could be trusted to regulate itself.
However, Trump himself has called AI safety fears a ‘hoax’ and rejected calls for greater safeguards. Calling himself the ‘Hoax Buster’, the US President compared AI warnings to the ‘Global Warming Scam’ which was ‘being perpetrated by the Radical Left Dumocrats’.
He wrote in a post: ‘There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!’
Meanwhile, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg argued that AI companies had both the ability and incentive to take their own safety measures.
‘Any lab that doesn’t focus on alignment will fall behind,’ he wrote on X.