Sam Altman, CEO of the San Francisco startup OpenAI that developed ChatGPT, his company's chatbot tool, on Tuesday urged US lawmakers to regulate artificial intelligence.
The latest figure to erupt from Silicon Valley, Altman's first testimony in front of a US Senate judiciary subcommittee was far from the testy grilling given to the bosses of Facebook or TikTok when they visited Washington.
I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong, and we want to be vocal about that. We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
"We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models. My worst fears are that we cause significant — we, the field, the technology industry — cause significant harm to the world," Altman said.
"I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong, and we want to be vocal about that," Altman added. "We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening."
The 38-year-old Stanford University dropout said the potential for AI to be used to manipulate voters and target disinformation are among "my areas of greatest concern", especially because "we're going to face an election next year and these models are getting better".
Altman said his company's technology may destroy some jobs but also create new ones and that it will be important for "government to figure out how we want to mitigate that".
Altman said the government could regulate the industry by creating an agency that issues licenses for the creation of large-scale AI models, safety regulations and tests that AI models must pass before being released to the public.
This "combination of licensing and testing requirements," he said, could be applied to the "development and release of AI models above a threshold of capabilities".
In the United States, lawmakers brought up the idea of an independent agency to oversee AI, rules that force companies to disclose how their models work and the data sets they use and antitrust rules to prevent companies like Microsoft and Google from monopolizing the nascent industry.
The rapid development of ChatGPT with an estimated 100 million users within two months has sparked an industry race, with Microsoft, an investor in OpenAI, enabling ChatGPT in the Windows operating system and Google adding its own so-called generative AI systems, including one called Bard, to its app.
The latest forms of AI also have drawn criticism from some of tech's biggest names for their potential to disrupt millions of jobs, spread misinformation and perpetuate biases.
Altman said OpenAI pretests and constantly updates its tools to ensure safety and that making them widely available to the public actually helps the company identify and mitigate risks.
Agencies contributed to this story.
