Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, warns that the world may not be “so far from terrifying artificial intelligence“, and said that regulating it will be “critical”.
In a series of tweets on Sunday, Altman has assured that a transition to an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled future is “mostly good” and it can happen quickly, such as the transition from the “pre-smartphone world to the post-smartphone world.”
However, he warns that society needs time to adjust to “something as big” as AI.
“We also need enough time for our institutions to know what to do. Regulation will be essential and it will take time to solve it; while current generation AI tools aren’t terribly scary, I think it’s potentially not that far away for other AIs to be scary,” he tweeted.
He points out that one of the problems with AI chatbots is that “people get restless when talking to a chatboteven though you know what’s really going on.”
This phenomenon has recently been observed with Microsoft’s Bing search engine, based on ChatGPT. Last week, Bing freaked some people out when it started giving shocking responses to querieswhich ranged from sarcastic and argumentative to overtly emotional.
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Microsoft explained last Wednesday that long chats can “confuse the model”which you may sometimes try to answer or “mirror the tone in which you are being asked to give responses which may lead to a style we did not intend.”
The company is also trying to rein in the platform: it now limits the number of trades users can have with the bot. Now users can do Bing up to 5 questions per session and have up to 50 sessions per day.
Altman has been talking about regulating AI since 2015
It is not the first time that Altman talks about regulating AI. Already in March 2015 she wrote about it on his personal blog.
“The United States government and all other governments should regulate the development of superhuman intelligence from machines. In an ideal world, regulation would slow down the bad guys and speed up the good guys: it looks like what happens with the first such tool to be developed will be very important,” Altman warned.
Altman’s Sunday tweet about regulation echoed comments by Mira Murati, the CTO of OpenAI, who said in a February 5 interview with the magazine Time that ChatGPT should be regulated as it could be misused. “It is not too early” to regulate it, Murati told the aforementioned outlet.
Elon Musk – co-founder of OpenAI together with Altman – stated last Wednesday during the World Summit of Governments held in Dubai that AI has “great, great promise” and capabilities, both positive and negative, but needs regulation.
“I think we need to regulate AI security, frankly. Actually I think it’s a bigger risk to society than cars or planes or medicine“warned the American billionaire.
