OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has warned that the rapid development of artificial intelligence could go “very badly” for humanity in two major ways.
Altman said humanity could either lose control of the future to AI or end up in a world where too much power is concentrated in the hands of one person or company.
“There are two ways AI progress could go very badly, and that we must avoid. First, we could lose control of the future to AI. This is unacceptable; we are unapologetically on Team Humanity,” Altman wrote in a post on X just after midnight on Monday.
“Second, we could end up in a world with too much concentration of power. If an extraordinarily powerful AI is used by one person or company to impress their worldview onto everyone else, the results could be extremely dystopian.”
Altman and rival Elon Musk, who were earlier this year locked in a legal battle, over the weekend backed a lengthy letter from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urging global companies to slow their work on top AI models.
The development came after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit his job and raised concerns within the industry, warning that companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI were “gambling with our lives” and that AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Meanwhile, the United States and China have remained locked in a fierce competition to pull ahead in the AI race, amid concerns that increasingly powerful AI could give China an advantage in surveillance, military operations and cybersecurity capabilities.
“Fear-mongering, confrontation, competition will just disrupt [the] process of global AI governance,” Guo Jiakun, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, said on Monday, according to a Reuters translation.
