The boss of OpenAI, the firm behind the massively popular ChatGPT bot, said on Friday that his firm’s technology would not destroy the job market as he tried to calm fears about the march of artificial intelligence (AI).
AI will not — as some have warned — wipe out entire sectors of the workforce through automation, Sam Altman said in Paris on a global tour to charm national leaders and powerbrokers.
“The idea that AI is going to progress to a point where humans have no work to do or no purpose has never resonated with me,” he said.
When asked about the media industry, where many outlets already use AI to generate stories, Altman said ChatGPT requires a journalist to hire 100 assistants to help them research and come up with ideas. Must be like
ChatGPT hit the headlines late last year, demonstrating its ability to generate essays, poems and conversations from the briefest of prompts.
Microsoft later spent billions of dollars to support OpenAI and now uses the firm’s technology in many of its products — starting a race with Google, which has made a number of similar announcements.
Altman, the 38-year-old rising star of Silicon Valley, has been greeted enthusiastically by leaders everywhere from Lagos to London.
Although earlier this week, he appeared to anger the European Union by indicating that his firm could leave the bloc if they regulate too strictly.
He insisted to a group of journalists on the sidelines of the Paris event that the headlines were not justified and that he had no intention of leaving the bloc – rather, OpenAI was likely to open an office in Europe in the future.
– ‘tedious’ –
The success of ChatGPT — which has been used by politicians to write speeches and has proven itself capable of passing tough tests — propelled Altman into the global spotlight.
He said, “Years from now, it will feel very special to reflect on… but it is also exhausting and I hope life settles down.”
OpenAI was formed in 2015 with investors including Altman and billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk, who left the firm in 2018 and has repeatedly bashed it in recent months.
Musk, who has his own AI ambitions, said he came up with the name OpenAI, investing $100 million in it after the company turned itself from nonprofit to for-profit in 2018, and has said that Microsoft now effectively runs the company.
Altman said, “I disagree with almost everyone, but I’ll try to avoid food battles here.”
Instead, he wanted to focus on OpenAI’s mission, which he said was to “maximum benefit” society from AI and specifically Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — the much-anticipated future where machines can perform all kinds of tasks. Will achieve mastery, not just a tho.
He acknowledged that the definitions of AGI were “fuzzy” and there was no consensus, but said that his definition was for when machines could make major scientific breakthroughs.
“To me, if you can find a fundamental principle of physics and answer it, I’ll call you AGI,” he said.
A major criticism of their products is that the firm does not publish the sources used to train its models.
Along with copyright issues, critics argue that users should know who is responsible for answering their questions, and whether those answers use material from offensive or racist webpages.
But Altman argued that the bottom line was that critics wanted to know whether the models themselves were racist.
“How it does on a racial bias test is what matters there,” he said, disregarding the idea that he should publish the sources.
He added that the latest model, GPT-4, was “surprisingly non-biased”.
(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed – AFP,