Sam Altman’s strategic ambiguity on AI sounds a lot like doublespeak
Live MintRemember when OpenAI’s nonprofit board unceremoniously fired Sam Altman? In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek published on Monday, Altman admitted that he’d once conjured a “totally random" date for when OpenAI would build artificial general intelligence, a theoretical threshold when AI surpasses human intelligence. Altman’s candour about that mistake was momentarily refreshing until he breezily made another prediction in the same interview: “I think AGI will probably get developed during this president’s term," he said. Bremmer points out US President-elect Donald Trump is likely to rescind President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI and that the international AI Safety Summit series, instigated by the UK, will be renamed “AI Action Summit" when it’s held this year in Paris. In one way, Altman’s comments about AGI’s imminent arrival help justify this pivot to “action" from “safety" in those summits, because meaningful oversight looks more challenging to set up when things are moving so quickly.