The CEO of OpenAI today called on Congress to pass more regulation on artificial intelligence but urged lawmakers to not only put guardrails around current capabilities but future ones as well.
“We spend most of our time today on current risks, and I think that’s appropriate,” he told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But “as these systems do become more capable, and I’m not sure how far away that is, but maybe not super far, I think it’s important that we also spend time talking about how we’re going to confront those challenges.”
This is because the “prospect of increased danger or risk resulting from even more complex and capable AI mechanisms certainly may be closer than a lot of people appreciate,” Altman said.
“If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.”
Altman, Christina Montgomery, IBM’s chief privacy and trust officer, and Gary Marcus, professor emeritus at New York University testified in a hearing before the Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law.
Altman said that is why OpenAI does “iterative deployment,” which is releasing capabilities little by little instead of developing it more fully in secret and then releasing it to the public all at once.
“While these systems are still relatively weak and deeply imperfect,” OpenAI lets the public use them in a real-world setting “to figure out what we need to do to make it safer and better,” Altman said. “And that is the only way that I’ve seen in the history of new technology and products of this magnitude to get to a very good outcome.”
With GPT-4, OpenAI vetted it for over six months before general release.
In a rare move, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) commended the speakers for not acting like other company executives in the past who balk at any regulation. “I sense that there is a willingness to participate here that is genuine and authentic.”
