OpenAI’s Sam Altman ‘confident’ industry can police AI safety

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said he believes AI companies can develop the technology safely without significant harm to people at large.

SAN FRANCISCO – OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said he believes artificial intelligence (AI) companies can develop the technology safely without significant harm to people at large.

“I am very confident in our company’s ability – our industry’s ability – to do this safely,” Altman said on Sept 15 during a discussion with Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.

Altman’s comments about the pace of AI advances came as policymakers and others in the industry debated whether government regulation is needed to keep AI from slipping beyond human control.

Dario Amodei, chief executive of OpenAI rival Anthropic, set off the latest debate after authoring an essay on Sept 12 that raised the potential risks of the technology and suggested development needed to be slowed.

While OpenAI is working with Anthropic and Alphabet’s AI lab Google DeepMind to address safety issues, Altman said AI companies should be able to safely improve AI models on their own.

“I’m disappointed by how it’s been framed,” he said. Bloomberg