Sam Altman is ready to decelerate
His change of position comes after "the first security incident that I have felt very viscerally. " OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that it may be time to "pace" AI development so the world will be ready for it. "We may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels," he told Patrick O'Shaughnessy, the host of the Invest Like the Best podcast, while also "trying to figure out how we do that in a way that does not feel like regulatory capture for anyone and also does not feel like collusion among the frontier labs.
Key Takeaways
- " Altman has avoided signing on to past campaigns to slow AI progress, calling a 2023 open letter that proposed a similar slowdown "missing most technical nuance about where we need the pause.
" Apparently, he's softened on the idea, thanks in part to the incident where one of OpenAI's advanced models managed to break out of a secure computing environment and hack into Hugging Face, an online model database, using several zero-day exploits.
- " OpenAI researchers have paused training on that model while they work out how to keep their sandbox secure.
But Altman said that as models become more powerful, the need to "pace" their development could become key to safe deployment.
- However, the industry has a trust problem, and challenging economics that give major players an incentive to play up the dangers of their systems in ways that experts disagree about - for example, whether or not Anthropic's Fable model should have been briefly banned from use or not.
Similarly, when Kimi K3, a large, open-weight model built in China, was released, OpenAI head of strategic futures Dean W.
- "I am terrified of a world where the very real fears of AI are used as a way to say, 'Only this small group of people can have it because it's too dangerous, and only they understand it, but don't worry, like, they're gonna make the right decisions for all of us.
- Formerly, he was a senior reporter at Quartz, the global business news site, for more than a decade, and began his career as a political reporter in Washington, D.
" Altman has avoided signing on to past campaigns to slow AI progress, calling a 2023 open letter that proposed a similar slowdown "missing most technical nuance about where we need the pause. " Apparently, he's softened on the idea, thanks in part to the incident where one of OpenAI's advanced models managed to break out of a secure computing environment and hack into Hugging Face, an online model database, using several zero-day exploits. On the podcast, the OpenAI co-founder called it an "extremely sci-fi cyber incident...
[t]his is the first security incident that I have felt very viscerally. " OpenAI researchers have paused training on that model while they work out how to keep their sandbox secure. But Altman said that as models become more powerful, the need to "pace" their development could become key to safe deployment.
Employees at OpenAI and Anthropic have already begun circulating a petition using similar language. While model safety and alignment has always been a concern in the AI world, the arrival of Anthropic's highly capable Mythos model earlier this year has turned hypotheticals into real-world problems. However, the industry has a trust problem, and challenging economics that give major players an incentive to play up the dangers of their systems in ways that experts disagree about - for example, whether or not Anthropic's Fable model should have been briefly banned from use or not.
For more details please read the original article at TechCrunch AI.
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