Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has reassured people that the company’s AI technology will not destroy the job market. Altman is currently on a global tour to charm national leaders and powerbrokers, and he has been addressing concerns about the potential impact of AI. Altman said that AI would not wipe out whole sectors of the workforce through automation. He has never believed the idea that AI would progress to a point where humans don’t have any work to do or don’t have any purpose.
ChatGPT should help journalists
Altman was in Paris when he made his comments. He discussed the media industry, where several outlets already use AI to generate stories. Altman said that ChatGPT should help journalists, rather than replace them. He compared the technology to giving a journalist 100 assistants to help them research and come up with ideas. ChatGPT burst into the spotlight late last year, demonstrating an ability to generate essays, poems and conversations from the briefest of prompts. Microsoft later invested billions of dollars in OpenAI and now uses the firm’s technology in several of its products, sparking a race with Google, which has made a slew of similar announcements.
OpenAI wants to maximise the benefits of AI
Altman is a 38-year-old emerging star of Silicon Valley. He has been receiving rapturous welcomes from leaders everywhere from Lagos to London. However, earlier this week he seemed to annoy the European Union by hinting that his firm could leave the bloc if they regulate too severely. Altman insisted to a group of journalists on the sidelines of the Paris event that the headlines were not fair and he had no intention of leaving the bloc. Instead, OpenAI was likely to open an office in Europe in the future.
OpenAI was formed in 2015 with investors including Altman and billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk, who left the firm in 2018 and has repeatedly criticised it in recent months. Musk, who has his own AI ambitions, said he came up with the name OpenAI, invested $100 million in it, was betrayed when the company turned itself from non-profit to profit-making in 2018, and has said Microsoft now effectively runs the company. Altman does not want to focus on these criticisms. Instead, he is focusing on OpenAI’s mission, which he says is to maximise the benefits to society of AI and particularly Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Altman conceded that definitions of AGI were “fuzzy” and there was no agreement, but he said his definition was when machines could make major scientific breakthroughs. “For me, if you can go figure out the fundamental theory of physics and answer it all, I’ll call you AGI,” he said. A major criticism of his products is that the firm does not publish the sources it uses to train its models. Critics argue that users should know who is responsible for answering their questions, and if those replies used material from offensive or racist webpages.
Altman argued that the bottom line was that critics wanted to know whether the models themselves were racist. “How it does on a racial bias test is what matters there,” he said, deflecting the idea that he should publish the sources. He said the latest model, GPT-4, was “surprisingly non-biased”.
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