OpenAI boss Sam Altman tells Congress he fears AI is ‘harm’ to the world | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI boss Sam Altman tells Congress he fears AI is ‘harm’ to the world

standard.co.uk

10 pointsconcertina22611 comments

While yes, these black boxes that are created with unknown methods and biases is worrisome, letting a CEO of a major company provide regulations to prevent competition in the space never seems to workout well.

He's just acknowledging that is what Congress is worried about. He's not just going to say "no I don't think it's possible that it can do harm" when they ask him if AI can do harm. If he was the kind of guy who would say that, he wouldn't have won whatever machiavelli hunger game power struggle to be CEO of the company. What I'm saying is that he is using his powers of social and emotional intelligence, he's not necessarily being sincere when he says these things to Congress, and at some level they don't want him to be or expect him to be sincere in that way.

It's entirely possible you're right, but isn't that also very cynical? Does the guy have an established track record of being questionable or evasive, or are you arguing for healthy cynicism as a safety stance?

It's not cynical and at that level it's not called being questionable or evasive. It's called being professional. The kind of sincerity that you seem to be expecting would be called like a nerdy socially unaware engineer type behavior and in the face of some obliviously sincere answer the congressmen would be glancing around looking for the actual CEO or for who the real adult in the room is.

Also asking for a track record of someone in this role in this situation is like if you see a new commercial and you believe everything they tell you is literally true until you see that this specific company's marketing department has a track record for anything less than complete sincerity in its ads or commercials or marketing claims or whatever.

He's a successful CEO of a large non profit but maybe for profit open source but not really open source ai lab that may be a company instead. So yes.

The boss of OpenAI, the startup that developed ChatGPT, has told US lawmakers that he welcomes and is strongly calling for more regulation to prevent the “harms” of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large-language models (LLM) like generative AI.

"My worst fear is that we, the industry, cause significant harm to the world. I think, if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong and we want to be vocal about that and work with the government on that,” OpenAI’s chief executive Samuel Altman told Congress on Tuesday afternoon.

Prof Marcus highlighted risks relating to AI systems subtly convincing people to change their beliefs without meaning to, referencing a recent article in the Wall Street Journal.

"We don’t know what ChatGPT 4 is trained on... how these systems might lead people about very much depends on what it is trained on. We need scientists doing analysis on what the political impact of these systems might be,” said Prof Marcus.

> "In addition to Mr Altman, senators heard from two other witnesses — Professor Gary Marcus of New York University, and Christina Montgomery, chief privacy and trust officer for tech giant IBM."

Oh good they got Gary Marcus and the Trust Officer of IBM to set the record straight.

So they were so preoccupied with whether they could, that they never stopped to think if they should.

At least they're vaguely pretending to think if they should. Obviously they haven't thought enough, or they would be shredding all of OpenAI's storage drives and GPUs today.

Clickbait title, and it worked!

OpenAI is the harm ironically

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