ChatGPT Creator Sam Altman Appears Before Congress, Urges Lawmakers to Regulate the Industry
By Movieguide® Contributor
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared before Congress earlier this week alongside other leaders in AI to advise lawmakers on the regulation of AI technologies.
Altman believes that the current tech boom has the potential to be a “printing press moment” forever changing human life. However, he recognizes the risks of the current approach to innovation in the tech industry and is encouraging lawmakers to regulate the boom.
“We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models,” Altman said in his opening remarks.
IBM’s vice president, Christina Montgomery, also appeared before Congress warning against Silicon Valley’s longstanding mantra of ‘move fast and break things.’
“The era of AI cannot be another era of ‘move fast and break things,” Montgomery said. “We don’t have to slam the brakes on innovation either.”
Altman suggested the government could regulate the industry by creating a licensing program for companies working on AI systems.
“[This] combination of licensing and testing requirements could be applied to the development and release of AI models above a certain threshold of capabilities,” Altman said.
Of the biggest concern are concerns over the use of AI to generate misinformation and manipulate voters, especially as an election year looms around the corner.
Senator Richard Blumenthal started Tuesday’s hearing with an AI-generated recording of his own voice, illustrating how AI can be used. The recording generated statements in Blumenthal’s likeness based on previous speeches he had made on the Senate floor. Blumenthal’s example lined up with his real views, but his illustration could just have easily produced “an endorsement of Ukraine surrendering or Vladimir Putin’s leadership,” he said. “[That] would’ve been really frightening.”
Another concern over the use of AI comes from the potential to eliminate millions of jobs.
“There will be an impact on jobs,” Altman said. “We try to be very clear about that, and I think it’ll require partnership between industry and government, but mostly action by government, to figure out how we want to mitigate that. But I’m very optimistic about how great the jobs of the future will be.”
Even as Altman is promoting safety and government regulation in the field, many top tech experts believe that he and his company are still moving too fast. Earlier this year, dozens of tech leaders signed an open letter urging companies to halt progress on AI development for at least six months so government regulation could catch up with the quickly evolving field.
“I think moving with caution and an increasing rigor for safety issues is really important,” Altman said in response to the letter. “The letter I didn’t think was the optimal way to address it.”
The rapid development of AI is certainly a concerning issue. Earlier this month, the “grandfather of AI” quit Google over fears of the pace of development.
Movieguide® previously reported:
Geoffrey Hinton, “the grandfather of A.I.,” resigned from Google on May 1st due to major concerns about the pace that A.I. is being developed.
Hinton led a team of graduate students to create the first neural network in 2012 while teaching at the University of Toronto. His neural network mimicked the function of the brain and could train itself to identify common objects after being given sample photos. At the time, many experts doubted this approach to A.I. would lead anywhere. Now it’s the method that all top-of-the-line A.I. products use.
With the help of his students, Hinton created an A.I. company which was later bought by Google for $44 million. Hinton joined Google to continue working on A.I. technology such as Google Bard, Google’s A.I.-powered search engine.
When ChatGPT was released to the public in November of last year with immediate success, Hinton got to see just how far his groundbreaking work had progressed. However, as Microsoft and Google were starting to race to create the strongest A.I., he began to question the ethics of their choice.
Until recently, Google had been careful in their A.I. development, only releasing technology after careful testing. However, recently they have been much less careful as they race to assert their dominance in this lucrative space.
As the technology continues to develop at breakneck speeds, Hinton is worried about the direction A.I. is headed. His immediate concern comes from the use of A.I. in creating false text, images, and videos. He worries that the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”
Later, once the technology is even stronger, his concern lies with the jobs that A.I. will likely replace. The A.I. tools available today complement human workers, but he worries A.I. may soon replace more than just menial tasks.
“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people – a few people believed that,” Hinton said. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”
While two major open letters were published earlier this year in which leading experts called the risks of A.I. to the public eye, Hinton refrained from signing either due to still working for Google. Even though he agreed with the letters’ sentiment at the time, he felt it was best to refrain from publicly criticizing Google, or other companies, until he left his job.
Now that he has resigned from Google, Hinton is advocating for the idea of global regulation of A.I., however, he realizes global regulation is not easy to achieve.
“Unlike with nuclear weapons, there is no way of knowing whether companies or countries are working on the technology in secret,” he said. “The best hope is for the world’s leading scientists to collaborate on ways of controlling the technology. I don’t think they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it.”
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