Sam Altman, creator of ChatGPT, immediately urges the United States to regulate companies that develop and use artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence has undergone such a revolution that there are already many who demand regulation by the institutions with the aim of preventing these systems from becoming a potential danger.
Added to this group very appropriately is Sam Altman, who you probably don’t know who he is, but he is the figure behind tools like ChatGPT or DALL-E and he currently runs OpenAI, the largest artificial intelligence company in the world.
This past Tuesday he addressed the United States Congress warning of the potential danger of uncontrolled artificial intelligence and the immediate need for regulation. It is quite curious how during a talk of almost 5 hours ChatGPT was compared with the invention of the printing press but also with the atomic bomb.
Sam Altman admitted that his “worst fears” are that it could cause a “significant harm” the world using this technology. “If this technology goes wrong, it could go badly wrong, and we want to talk about it. We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening.”he explained.
A growing regulatory need
To put this topic in context—potential dangers of AI— include two large topics recently covered:
- On March 22 the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit organization, published an open letter calling for a 6-month pause on building AI systems that are more powerful than OpenAI’s existing GPT-4 service. Sam Altman, who is behind all this huge AI development, is not among the current 27,000 signatories.
- On the other hand, there seems to be a general agreement that the growth of AI is accelerating and could get out of control, especially in the European Union where an Artificial Intelligence Law is already being worked on. The United States has yet to take action.
With all this in mind, it seems that Sam Altman affirms that its development should not be stopped, but he does urge immediate regulation and therefore control in the United States. “I don’t think the letter was the optimal way to approach it”he explained.
Mention that not only he was part of this “interrogation” by Congress. IBM’s director of privacy and trust Christina Montgomery and New York University professor emeritus Dr. Gary Marcus accompanied Altman.
However, his speech was far from the ideas of some senators. “This developing technology requires regulatory intervention by governments, which is critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models”they explained.
The CEO of OpenAI confirms what the European Union already seeks to pursue. He believes that companies should be empowered to create and enforce the rules for the AI industry, issuing licenses to AI companies and revoking them in case their technologies get out of hand.
Dr. Marcus also agreed that creating a new government agency would be the best way to regulate artificial intelligence, saying that “we probably need a cabinet-level organization”. He compared the AI models with “bulls in a china shop” in his opening statement.
However, it seems that Congress preferred to focus its discourse mainly on ChatGPT. Senator Richard Blumenthal, who chaired the hearing, opened with a recorded speech that sounded like the senator’s but was actually a trained voice clone reciting text written by ChatGPT.
Altman, stunned, did admit the potential risk of this tool and the possibility of thousands of jobs being replaced, although he also wanted to make it clear that “it will also create new ones that we think will be much better”.
The focus is not on whether or not ChatGPT can replace the population of its jobs or end up generating misinformation —although it is also a point to take into account and pursue. The true specialists in artificial intelligence go further and they demand a regulation in the face of this massive exploitation of this technology that is just a spark away from blowing up.