OpenAI’s Altman reveals deepest AI fears, hopes to UAE audience

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has revealed his biggest fears and hopes around the future of artificial intelligence as he addressed the World Government Summit via video link on Tuesday.

The World Government Summit, which is currently being hosted in Dubai from 12 – 14 February 2024, brings together top government and private sector leaders from across the globe to identify innovative solutions for future challenges.

Altman is one of the key speakers at this year’s summit and he was interviewed by the UAE’s Minister of Artificial Intelligence Omar Sultan Al Olama. Interestingly, Al Olama remains the world’s only government minister of AI.

In his interview with Altman, Al Olama asked the OpenAI CEO about what his biggest fears and hopes are around this fast-growing technology.

Altman indicated that he doesn’t believe that “killer robots” will walk down our streets. But he said he is more concerned about societal impacts.

“I’m much more interested in the very subtle societal misalignments where we just have these systems out in society and through no particular ill-intention, things just go horribly wrong,” Altman told the audience.

But the OpenAI CEO went on to say that the “thing that wakes me up in the morning” is the huge potential of this technology to improve people’s lives.

“I actually believe that things will go tremendously right,” he said.

“I think we can easily imagine a world in the future where everybody has got a better life than what people have today. I think we can raise the standard of living so incredibly much [more],” Altman added.

He went on to say that AI, in the future, could give individuals unparalleled access to power and knowledge.

“If you think of everybody on earth getting the resources of a company, of like hundreds of thousands of really competent people, and what that would do…you will have your entire career flooded with opportunity,” he added.

Altman on AI regulation

When asked about what he would do if he were a Minister of AI for a day, Altman said he would try to find better ways of helping leaders understand the consequences of any potential regulation of AI.

“I would try to create more of a regulatory sandbox where people could experience more with this technology, and be able to figure out or dream or imagine whatever the world could look like, and then I would try to see what makes sense and what doesn’t and write the regulation around that. I think we have to try. I think it’s very hard to get all of the regulatory ideas right in a vacuum. And if there was a contained way that I could find a way to give people the future and let them experiment with it, and then see what went really wrong and what went really right, and write the regulation around that,” said Altman.

Altman went on to say that he would also look to spark more discussions around AI and even proposed the creation of a global body similar to that of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

“We are going to need, at some point, some sort of global system,” said Altman.

“And I think because of a bunch of reasons, the UAE would be so well set up to be a leader in the discussions around that, I would host a one day conference with leaders from around the world to brainstorm that,” Altman added, to which Al Olama responded, “done, we’ll do that”.

Altman has become a celebrity in the tech world ever since OpenAI burst onto the scene in late 2022 when it introduced its hit AI tool, ChatGPT, to the world.

Since then, OpenAI has become regarded as a leader in the AI space. Altman, though, hasn’t been without controversy as his board ousted him, briefly, in December 2023, only for the CEO to return with the backing of key shareholders in the company.