OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Says Arrival of AI ‘...

Exec says industry needs “new economic models” to compensate creators for AI Sam Altman, CEO of artificial-intelligence power player OpenAI, believes that the next major developments in the AI sector will be more disruptive than people expect

Published Time: 04.12.2024 - 20:31:38 Modified Time: 04.12.2024 - 20:31:38

Exec says industry needs “new economic models” to compensate creators for AI

Sam Altman, CEO of artificial-intelligence power player OpenAI, believes that the next major developments in the AI sector will be more disruptive than people expect.

Altman, speaking at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit in New York City on Wednesday, predicted that as soon as 2025 the industry will begin to see the first examples of artificial general intelligence (AGI) in which you can give an AI system a very complicated task (as you would a human) and it will use different tools to complete it.

“I think it’s possible… in 2025 we will have systems that we look at… and people will say, ‘Wow, that changes what I expected,'” he said.

Related Stories

At first, the introduction of AGI — or “superintelligence” as some define it — will have minimal effect, Altman said. But eventually it will “be more intense than people think,” Altman said, adding that with every major technological achievement, there’s been significant job displacement.

Asked about critics who say OpenAI is not focused enough on safety, Altman responded, “I’d point to our track record.”

ChatGPT now has more than 300 million weekly users, according to Altman, and he said it “is now generally considered by most of society to be acceptably safe and acceptably robust.” While “there are definitely people who think ChatGPT is not sufficiently safe” he said the company believes that iterative deployment is important and that “you have to start when the stakes are lower.”

Altman compared the advent of AI to the invention of the transistor, which came to be used by companies all over the world and transformed economies. “There will be shockingly capable AI models, widely available, used for everything,” he said. AI itself, the reasoning engine, will become commoditized, Altman opined.

In 2015, Altman, 39, co-founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and DALL-E, as a not-for-profit research lab. He served as president of early-stage start-up accelerator Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019. Altman left YC in 2019 to become CEO of OpenAI. A year ago, the board fired him — then rehired him less than a week later — in a dispute concerning “his communications with the board.”

Tech mogul Elon Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI, has sued OpenAI and Altman, alleging breach of contract by deviating from its original nonprofit mission. According to the lawsuit, Musk was “betrayed by Mr. Altman and his accomplices. The perfidy and deceit is of Shakespearean proportions.” Musk has launched his own artificial-intelligence startup, xAI.

Altman said Musk’s legal action against OpenAI made him feel “tremendously sad.̶ -

Police: UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson ,...

1; “I grew up seeing Elon as a mega-hero,” he said. “At some point Musk totally lost faith in OpenAI.” Altman also said he assumes Musk’s XAI “will be a really serious competitor.” He also said he didn’t think Musk would use his political clout with Donald Trump to harm competitors, saying such behavior would be “profoundly un-American.”

When OpenAI started, Altman said, the founders didn’t realize it needed the enormous amount of capital needed to develop the product and did not expect to introduce commercial products. “It was not clear we would have a product or a revenue stream,” Altman said, but that changed after the launch of ChatGPT. The company’s board is at work on determining how to proceed in shifting toward for-profit status, he said.

OpenAI has been at the center of other controversies. The company has been the target of lawsuits — including by the New York Times Co., which alleged the AI player engaged in massive copyright infringement by using the publication’s articles to train its systems. Last week, OpenAI shut off public access to Sora, its gen-AI video tool, following a protest staged by artists who had agreed to be early testers of the system who complained they were being exploited for PR purposes and unpaid R&D.

About the legal questions about copyright and AI, Altman said the “discussions of fair use” are at the wrong level, and that the industry needs to find “new economic models” to compensate creators for AI. DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, who interviewed Altman, responded that the resolution to those questions will be settled by the justice system: “We’ll see you in court,” he told Altman, eliciting laughs.

In October, OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in new funding from investors including Microsoft and Nvidia, giving it a post-money valuation of $157 billion. The San Francisco-based company has around 1,700 employees after hiring more than 1,000 since the beginning of the year.

About OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft, Altman acknowledged that it has not been without “misalignments or challenges” but that on the whole it’s been a “positive thing for both companies.”

“There’s not no tension, but on the whole our priorities are aligned,” Altman said.

OpenAI recently launched an internet search tool, and Altman — who called running the tech company “my childhood dream job” — said it’s his favorite product the company has ever launched. “It has completely changed my usage of the internet,” he said.