‘Some bad things’ may happen to you, but that’s a sacrifice Sam Altman is willing to make
OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman was on Politico’s Decoded podcast yesterday, deflecting on a variety of topics. But there’s one amazing quote, which has been making a splash: [YouTube] I think one of the biggest differences between us and some of the stricter, let’s say, AI safety people, is we…
Annons
Annons
OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman was on Politico’s Decoded podcast yesterday, deflecting on a variety of topics. But there’s one amazing quote, which has been making a splash: [YouTube] I think one of the biggest differences between us and some of the stricter, let’s say, AI safety people, is we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency. What bad things, Sam? Who are the bad things happening to, Sam? If you were feeling generous, you could read that just as all tech having costs and benefits. Sure. But there’s context here — such as OpenAI’s recent hacking run and how the AI vendors are now telling the general public their chatbot might kill everyone, maybe. But we need to not shut them all down, for some reason. Altman’s been on the AI killing everyone kick for over a decade now. Here’s Altman from 2015, at Airbnb’s Open Air conference, back when he was still a venture capitalist at Y Combinator and just getting OpenAI started: [YouTube] I think AI will probably, like, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, uh, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning. Yeah, that’s great, Sam. For you and me, Altman’s great tech increasingly just has costs. OpenAI keeps making our lives a misery. It rents huge obnoxious data centres. It drives up the cost of anything electronic. The AI companies sell their chatbot as getting us all fired and making our lives even worse. And if you have a job, you get to use Copilot or Claude Code! Then they’re surprised when people don’t want to take them in good faith. Altman also pursues this theme of how your life has to suck a bit now so it can suck more later in his new Vanity Fair interview, just out. [Vanity Fair, archive] Altman goes through a pile of disasters his chatbot could bless us with. AI hacks all the computers! AI makes a virulent new disease! AI could make humans extinct! But that’s okay, see: We are willing to accept some things going wrong to make sure that this is a widely held and used and democratic technology. Altman does not care about democracy. He’s not looking for widespread empowerment. When he says “democracy,” he means he wants permission — he wants enablers. Altman already says the Singularity is here! But you’ll still be stuck barely surviving on a crappy job. The key point about the AI guys is they do not care about you. When they talk about humanity, they mean only guys like themselves. Video — Podcast