Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, has spoken out on the harmful effects of artificial intelligence. While virtually addressing the World Governments Summit at Dubai on Tuesday, February 13, Altman highlighted the need for a body like the International Atomic Energy Agency which will effectively deal with and oversee the operations of AI.
There’s some things in there that are easy to imagine where things really go wrong. And I’m not that interested in the killer robots walking on the street direction of things going wrong,” Altman said. “I’m much more interested in the very subtle societal misalignments where we just have these systems out in society and through no particular ill intention, things just go horribly wrong.”
He also added that bodies like OpenAI should not be in charge of making decisions in order to regulate and govern the industry. Talking about the fast-paced development of artificial intelligence, Altman emphasized how this new era of technology has ushered in a lot of discussions and debates with regard to policy-making which are still developing, however, it is crucial to move in a direction where these developments can see real time application in the next few years through the curation and implementation of necessary action plans.
OpenAI Taking The Lead In Mainstream Artificial Intelligence
San Francisco-based AI startup, OpenAI has taken over the world with its technology, with Microsoft investing around $1 billion. It has also entered into a contract with The Associated Press, providing it with an access to its news archive. The success has made Sam Altman “the face for generative AI’s rapid commercialization”.
The AI startup and the tech giant Microsoft had however ended up in hot waters following a lawsuit which was filed by The New York Times last year for using the latter’s stories to train OpenAI’s chatbots.
UAE’s Technological Investments
Altman is currently in the process of “courting investors in the Middle East for a semiconductor initiative to advance AI”. The United Arab Emirates is currently one of the biggest investors of AI technology, however recent developments with regard to the relations between UAE and China has stirred concerns for the US.
On Monday, CEO of Emirati AI company G42, Peng Xiao, revealed that G42 is curtailing its Chinese investments in order to appease Western markets and address the concerns of the USA over the Emirati company’s presence in China. “All of our China investments that were previously made are already divested”, Xiao stated in an interview with Bloomberg News. G42 has ties with OpenAI, Microsoft and Cerebras Systems.
Altman is currently planning to open-source some large-language models (LLMs) of his company. As per, TechTarget, a large language model (LLM) is “a type of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that uses deep learning techniques and massively large data sets to understand, summarize, generate and predict new content”.
He further said that the company is in the process of developing tools that will help poorer nations that are incapable of bearing the costs of developing AI systems on their own. “We want to have an offering that makes sense for countries that want to offer AI services,” said the OpenAI CEO.
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