Sam Altman: there’s no “magic red button” to stop AI

[Music] these are two of the most important people shaping the future of artificial intelligence Sam Alman the CEO of open aai the startup behind chat GPT and Satia Adela the CEO of Microsoft open ai's biggest investor they spoke to the economists editor and chief about what the future of AI really looks like Sam let's start with you what are the most important capabilities that chat GPT will develop in the next year the world had like a twoe freak out with gp4 right this changes everything AGI is coming tomorrow there are no jobs by the end of the year and now people are like why is it so slow um and I love that I think that's a great thing about the human spirit that we always want more and better we've not had this where there has been some general purpose technology whose diffusion happened instantaneously everywhere in any place Healthcare and education is most to the government span you now have right the ability to give every student and every citizen of the of the globe a better health advis and a better personalized tutor you know I often think one interesting way to measure this is what percent of tasks can gb4 do let's say it's 10% can GPT 5 do 12% of human tasks or 15 or 20 but the fact that so many people are able to use it for productivity in their workflow that's the power and I know it's not as satisfying as saying here's each thing it will do but it's that it becomes a companion for knowledge work it becomes a way to use a computer I hear that and that's that's a absolutely appropriate answer to my question but I guess I'm trying to get at the sense of whether this is incremental or whether it's radical even in the next year I believe that someday we will make something that qualifies as an AGI by whatever fuzzy definition you want the world will have a twoe freakout and then people will go on with their lives samman just said the world will only have a two we freakout when we get to AGI that's quite a statement to make one thing I say a lot is no one knows what happens next and I can't see to the other side of that event horizon with any detail but it does seem like the Deep human motivations will not go anywhere this is when people start getting alarmed that we have no idea well I think that's just going to have an intelligence that is more intelligence than all of us and we have no idea what happened no no like one thing I love to do is go back and read about the contemporaneous accounts of technological revolutions at the time and the expert predictions are just always totally wrong and you need to have some flexibility in your opinions and look have a tight feedback loop with how it's going with the world the amount of focus on safety and regulation is sort of very very high tell me what you whether you think Regulators have got it right or whether we're not doing enough at this point you know if I look at what the White House EO is or what the UK safety Summit is what's happening in Europe what's happening in Japan they are going to have a say nation states are absolutely going to have a say on what is the regulation that controls any technology development most importantly what is ready for deployment or not and so I feel like we will all be subject to those Rags if you were ever in that room and you thought to yourself this is getting dangerous and this could actually have consequences that I would not want upon the world would you then shout stop and would you stop there's no like one big magic red button we have that blows up the data center which I think some people sort of assume exists it's not this binary gostop decision it is the many little decisions along the way about allow this don't allow this how to predict what the the risks of the future are going to be how to mitigate those set this new value here um things like that thanks for watching to watch the full interview click the link and subscribe to The Economist

Channel: The Economist

Views: 347,453

Keywords: The Economist, Economist, Economist Films, Economist Videos, Politics, News, short-documentary, ai, artificial intelligence, sam altman, microsoft, satya nadella, agi, davos, chatgpt, chatgpt4, future of ai

Id: RcXzmO8zOLg

Length: 3min 54sec (234 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 18 2024