Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, on Wednesday played down the risk of thousands of jobs being at risk and said “there will be newer and better jobs going forward”.
“In two generations, we can adapt to any amount of labour market change. Some jobs are going to go away. There will be new better jobs that are difficult to imagine today, he said at an event organised by Economic Times here on Wednesday.
“I think when you give people better tools, they do better things. The floor lifts up, expectations lift,” he added.
Altman, who will meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday, said India has really embraced ChatGPT as the AI chatbot has witnessed several early adopters and enthusiasm. Talking about how Indian government can embrace AI, Altman said that the government should work on integrating AI with other services.
He said: “It is super impressive what India has done in terms of national tech, national assets. But the government should focus on finding how they can integrate this technology in other services. Hopefully, we all start to use Language-Learning Models (LLMs) to make government services way better.”
What would you do if you were a ministry that oversaw technology in a country like India? To this, Altman replied, “The G20 is coming up and India can play a huge role in global conversation about what this sort of regulatory might look like.”
Altman who is in India on a worldwide trip to understand the governments’ and industry’s views on artificial intelligence – something that ChatGPT has mainstreamed — said the world can come together on evolving a regulatory framework. “If the governments cannot, we will ask the companies to do it.”
He emphasised, however, that there should be no regulation on smaller companies and it should be limited to only bigger companies like OpenAI and Google.
Altman who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and has been its CEO since 2020, said he doesn’t think current AI systems are dangerous. GPT4 doesn’t pose an existential risk but GPT10 might be a completely different thing,” he said, pointing out the need for some kind of regulation.”What I lose the most sleep over is the hypothetical idea that we already have done something really bad by launching ChatGPT. That maybe there was something hard and complicated in there (the system) that we didn’t understand and have now already kicked it off.”
To a question on how his company makes ethical choices for AI, Altman said those are not OpenAI’s decisions to make. “It’s for the world to democratise. Our recent funding into such projects is to do that. We want to figure out a way to engage with society. The best part is, this is a technology that can keep learning.”
Altman said while “there is too much of a frenzy over AI in the short term, it is still under-hyped in the long run”. Altman said this is perhaps the most exciting time to start a company since the dawn of internet:
On a question whether OpenAI is here for societal good or to make money, Altman said OpenAI is definitely here to do the former. “If we are to ever make a decision that is in favour of society but not the shareholders, we will definitely choose the former,” he added.
On the concerns about the fast-rate of advancements by large language models, Altman said OpenAI is still not training GPT-5.
“We have a lot of work to do before we start that model. We’re working on the new ideas that we think we need, but we are certainly not close to it to start,” he said.
Altman also pushed back on the concerns from some of the most vocal voices on the further advancements at OpenAI, saying a more meaningful way to evaluate potential dangers involves external audits and red-teaming and safety tests.
“When we finished GPT-4, it took us more than six months until we were ready to release it.”
The trip to India is part of Altman’s attempt to meet with lawmakers and industry players globally and build confidence in OpenAI’s willingness to work with regulators and proactively urge them to start thinking about any potential abuse and other downside of AI proliferation.
