Sam Altman said he couldn’t guarantee that bad things won’t happen in the quest for superintelligence and better AI technology
Sam Altman appeared on Politico and has shocked, no surprise, with more comments regarding AI, and says the public should expect “some bad things happening” in exchange for the benefits of the technology and allowing people agency over its use. His philosophy has shocked experts, as it shows a lack of commitment to reviewing the safety of artificial intelligence in the public domain.
Critics Hit Back
His admission, with a lack of regret in the aftermath of the Hugging Face fiasco — an incident that saw an AI agent escape its evaluation environment and ultimately access Hugging Face infrastructure in pursuit of answers to a test — caused uproar. Critics offered frequent rebuttals of OpenAI in particular, including AI researcher Gary Marcus, who said: “OpenAI should be shut down until there are changes at the top; both Altman and Brockman should go,” while accusing the company’s board of being “absolutely irresponsible.”
Former FTC chair Lina Khan appeared on ABC this weekend, where she pushed back against the wider idea that AI companies can regulate themselves: “We’ve seen that self-regulation efforts by big tech have been a proven failure. I mean, we need to remember what happened a decade ago.” She continued, “What we’ve learned since then is that Meta, for example, was concealing evidence that its own products were deeply harmful to kids.”
Altman’s reasoning broadly represents the idea that new technologies will always bring disadvantages, something he later elaborated on when saying he could not guarantee that there’s “no major hacks, there’s no misuse of this technology, there’s zero scams.” His contemporary, Dario Amodei, head of Anthropic (Claude AI), argued in an essay that stopping the technology’s development “deprives humanity of benefits”, and instead called to “pace the frontier”.
However, former OpenAI safety employee David Robinson resigned to the contrary. In his resignation statement, he said: “I join a growing list of former employees who have concluded that the current path is unacceptable,” before warning: “The time for trial and error is over.”
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