OpenAI Chief Sam Altman Seeks to Calm Fears on Job Losses

The boss of OpenAI, the agency behind the massively widespread ChatGPT bot, mentioned on Friday that his agency’s expertise wouldn’t destroy the job market as he sought to calm fears concerning the march of synthetic intelligence (AI).

Sam Altman, on a worldwide tour to appeal nationwide leaders and powerbrokers, mentioned in Paris that AI wouldn’t — as some have warned — wipe out entire sectors of the workforce by way of automation.

“This concept that AI goes to progress to some extent the place people don’t have any work to do or don’t have any objective has by no means resonated with me,” he said.

Asked about the media industry, where several outlets already use AI to generate stories, Altman said ChatGPT should instead be like giving a journalist 100 assistants to help them research and come up with ideas.

ChatGPT burst into the highlight late final yr, demonstrating a capability to generate essays, poems and conversations from the briefest of prompts.

Microsoft later laid out billions of dollars to support 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.

Altman, a 38-year-old emerging star of Silicon Valley, has received rapturous welcomes from leaders everywhere from Lagos to London.

Though earlier this week, he seemed to annoy the European Union by hinting that his firm could leave the bloc if they regulate too severely.

He 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 — rather, OpenAI was likely to open an office in Europe in the future.

– ‘Exhausting’ –

The success of ChatGPT — which has been used by politicians to write speeches and proved itself capable of passing tough exams — has thrust Altman into a global spotlight.

“Years from now, reflecting on this will feel very special… but it is also quite exhausting and I hope life calms down,” he mentioned.

OpenAI was shaped in 2015 with traders together with Altman and billionaire Twitter proprietor Elon Musk, who left the agency in 2018 and has repeatedly bashed it in latest months.

Musk, who has his personal AI ambitions, mentioned he got here up with the identify OpenAI, invested $100 million in it, was betrayed when the corporate turned itself from non-profit to profit-making in 2018, and has mentioned Microsoft now successfully runs the corporate.

“I disagree with nearly all of that, however I’ll attempt to keep away from a meals combat right here,” said Altman. “There’s got to be more important things than whatever he’s going on about.”

Instead, he needed to deal with the mission of OpenAI, which he mentioned was to “maximise the advantages” to society of AI and particularly Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — the much-vaunted future where machines will master all sorts of tasks, not just one.

He conceded that definitions of AGI were “fuzzy” and there was no settlement, however mentioned his definition was when machines might make main scientific breakthroughs.

“For me, in case you can go work out the basic concept of physics and reply all of it, I’ll name 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.

As well as copyright issues, critics argue that users should know who is responsible for answering their questions, and if those replies used material from offensive or racist webpages.

But Altman argued 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 mentioned, deflecting the concept that he ought to publish the sources.

He mentioned the most recent mannequin, GPT-4, was “surprisingly non-biased”.

(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed – AFP)