AsianFin-- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has noted on Sunday the poor will benefit more from artificial intelligence than the rich in answering questions from Sally Kornbluth, MIT president and cell biologist.
"If (AI services) become something that everyone gets for free, that should help poor people more than rich people," he said.
In response to a question asked by Kornbluth, Altman also addressed bias, saying OpenAI has made surprisingly good progress in dealing with its influence.
"For as much as people like to talk about this and say 'oh, we can use these things because they're just spewing toxic waste all the time,'" he said, "GPT works well (in some ways) …and… who decides what bias means? How do we decide what the system is supposed to do?"
Then he mentioned an important trade-off: where do people put the hard limits for AI use?
"I think it's important to give people a lot of control," he said. "That said, there are some things that a system just shouldn't do."
Kornbluth asked him how to navigate between privacy and the need for shared data.
In response, Altman predicted that the future involves personalized AI with "a full recording of your life."
"You can imagine that will be a super helpful thing to have," he said. "You can also imagine the privacy concerns that it would present. … If we stick on that, how are we going to navigate the privacy versus utility versus safety trade-off, or security trade-offs that come with that?"
He mused that AI might, for example, testify against you or get subpoenaed by a court.
"That will be a new thing for society to navigate," he said. "We already have (some of this privacy issue) with services we all use: AI makes it higher stakes, higher trade-offs."
Altman also talked about how he envisions artificial superintelligence gaining ground.
He described potential for either a "utopic" or "dystopic" scenario, with ever more powerful sentient engines having more foundational effects on our societies.
"It’s this magic thing in the tower," he noted, "that we can ask any question, and it answers it, and it's constantly figuring out how to improve the world..."
One point Altman went into is that AI systems can make people more productive. But he also talked about AI having its own shared intelligence, in its joined infrastructure.
Humans, he noted, have this, too.
"This scaffolding exists between all of us," he said. "Somebody contributes one insight about material science, generations become more capable…"
Likewise, he said, new artificial intelligence will be shared between neural networks.
"AGI is not about what exists in any one data center," he said, "but it's this vast production – of intelligence and a technology tree that lets us – accomplish things well (beyond) the information and processing power of some (individual) neural network."
When it comes to how will AI affect professionals, he said, in general, it’s “a great time to be starting out your career.”
"There's a lot of dynamism," he said. "What this means is that you can change course many times – you will benefit from being very adaptable – this is going to be an unusual time in terms of how much it rewards adaptability and quick movement."
In terms of future advances, Altman suggested that the cost of compute will drop precipitously, to close to the cost of energy.
Altman also talked about the possibility of every college freshman learning how to accomplish AI tasks, and about societal uses for AI in general.
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