The New York Times. Credit…Laura Salafia.

Dear Commons Community,

Cade Metz, a  technology reporter for The New York Times has a featured article today, based on an interview with OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman.  Entitled, “The ChatGPT King Isn’t Worried, but He Knows You Might Be,” Altman comments on what he sees as the pros and cons of totally changing the world as we know it. And if he does make human intelligence useless, he has a plan to fix it.   Here is an excerpt. 

“In 2019, Altman believed artificial general intelligence (A.G.I) would bring the world prosperity and wealth like no one had ever seen. He also worried that the technologies his company was building could cause serious harm — spreading disinformation, undercutting the job market. Or even destroying the world as we know it.

“I try to be upfront,” he said. “Am I doing something good? Or really bad?”

In 2019, this sounded like science fiction.

In 2023, people are beginning to wonder if Sam Altman was more prescient than they realized.

Now that OpenAI has released an online chatbot called ChatGPT, anyone with an internet connection is a click away from technology that will answer burning questions about organic chemistry, write a 2,000-word term paper on Marcel Proust and his madeleine or even generate a computer program that drops digital snowflakes across a laptop screen — all with a skill that seems human.

As people realize that this technology is also a way of spreading falsehoods or even persuading people to do things they should not do, some critics are accusing Mr. Altman of reckless behavior.

This past week, more than a thousand A.I. experts and tech leaders called on OpenAI and other companies to pause their work on systems like ChatGPT, saying they present “profound risks to society and humanity.”

The article concludes as follows:

“Mr. Altman believes that effective altruists have played an important role in the rise of artificial intelligence, alerting the industry to the dangers. He also believes they exaggerate these dangers.

As OpenAI developed ChatGPT, many others, including Google and Meta, were building similar technology. But it was Mr. Altman and OpenAI that chose to share the technology with the world.

Many in the field have criticized the decision, arguing that this set off a race to release technology that gets things wrong, makes things up and could soon be used to rapidly spread disinformation. On Friday, the Italian government temporarily banned ChatGPT in the country, citing privacy concerns and worries over minors being exposed to explicit material.

Mr. Altman argues that rather than developing and testing the technology entirely behind closed doors before releasing it in full, it is safer to gradually share it so everyone can better understand risks and how to handle them.

He told me that it would be a “very slow takeoff.”

When I asked Mr. Altman if a machine that could do anything the human brain could do would eventually drive the price of human labor to zero, he demurred. He said he could not imagine a world where human intelligence was useless.

If he’s wrong, he thinks he can make it up to humanity.

He rebuilt OpenAI as what he called a capped-profit company. This allowed him to pursue billions of dollars in financing by promising a profit to investors like Microsoft. But these profits are capped, and any additional revenue will be pumped back into the OpenAI nonprofit that was founded back in 2015.

His grand idea is that OpenAI will capture much of the world’s wealth through the creation of A.G.I. and then redistribute this wealth to the people. In Napa, as we sat chatting beside the lake at the heart of his ranch, he tossed out several figures — $100 billion, $1 trillion, $100 trillion.

If A.G.I. does create all that wealth, he is not sure how the company will redistribute it. Money could mean something very different in this new world.

But as he once told me: “I feel like the A.G.I. can help with that.”

Altman may be in a world by himself but he is honest when admitting that he is not sure what  A.G.I. will bring!

The entire article is worth a read.

Tony