Sam Altman thinks humanity is “on a path to self destruction as a species right now,” he said. The OpenAI Inc. chief executive officer offered artificial intelligence as the solution.
“We need technology if we want to flourish for tens or hundreds of millions, or thousands of millions of years,” Altman said on a panel Wednesday at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco.
Altman joined other tech executives Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Product Officer Chris Cox and Google Senior Vice President James Manyika. Both Meta and Google have products that compete with OpenAI.
Altman said that big regulatory changes weren’t needed for current AI models, but would be soon.
“We don’t need heavy regulation here or probably for the next couple generations,” he said. “But at some point when a model can do the equivalent output of a whole company, or a whole country, or a whole world, maybe we do want some collective supervision around that.”
Altman has previously called for regulation of very powerful AI models, which some technologists fear could become uncontrollable by their creators. Earlier this year Altman told Congress that the US and other governments should consider imposing regulation on products “above a crucial threshold of capabilities.”
Cox said that Meta had worked with a variety of people including at the White House when developing its artificial intelligence large language model, Llama 2. “I think all of those steps are necessary,” he said. “You can’t jut say ‘trust us.’”
Cox also said that the company was focusing “quite seriously on our role in elections,” and noted that while AI could exacerbate some misinformation problems, it would also be very useful in detecting harmful content before it spreads.
