OpenAI’s Altman: ‘The world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology’ 

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OpenAI’s Altman: The risks will be worth it

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Politico that people should accept the risks of AI in order to gain its benefits. “We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency,” he told the site. The trade-off will be worth it, he argued: “I wouldn’t take a trade of saying, ‘We’ll make sure there’s no major hacks, there’s no misuse of this technology, there’s zero scams, there’s zero all the other bad things that will happen’ … Because I think people will do tremendously—orders of magnitude more—good stuff than bad stuff.”

That’s a tone shift from Altman. When he talked to Fortune’s Alyson Shontell recently, he was more cautious. A 10% risk of AI killing us all by the end of the decade is unacceptable, Altman said. He insisted that OpenAI has not, and would not, take that risk.

“We are entering a new era,” he said. “We are clearly, today, at a point on the curve with great potential and real risk.”

“We have not solved alignment,” he said, referring to efforts to create AI that’s aligned with human values. “I believe no lab has solved alignment. I get nervous when I hear rumors that people think they sufficiently solved alignment, that they can continue training and it’s okay because their model is a nice guy and isn’t going to do anything wrong.” 

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