OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said he believes artificial intelligence companies can develop the technology safely without significant harm to people at large.
“I am very confident in our company’s ability – our industry’s ability – to do this safely,” Altman said, during a conference in San Francisco.
Altman’s comments about the pace of AI advances came as policymakers and others in the industry debated whether government regulation is needed to keep AI from slipping beyond human control.
Dario Amodei, chief executive of OpenAI rival Anthropic, set off the latest debate after authoring an essay Saturday that raised the potential risks of the technology and suggested development needed to be slowed.
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While OpenAI is working with Anthropic and Google DeepMind to address safety issues, Altman said AI companies should be able to safely improve AI models on their own.
“I’m disappointed by how it’s been framed,” he said.
Nvidia’s chief executive Jensen Huang, meanwhile, dismissed the need for new artificial intelligence security regulations, arguing that market forces will help companies safely innovate.
“We don’t need new laws – we don’t need new regulations,” Huang said.
He said there was a “false choice” about AI development being either safe or fast, reiterating a point he’s made previously.
“You can definitely have both at the same time,” he said. “You pace yourself until you’re confident you’re releasing something that the market would appreciate. The market forces are already there.”
Huang has added his voice to a polarising discussion about how to manage AI risks.
Though leaders from Anthropic and other large labs have discussed an orchestrated slowdown of tech development, other leaders have called for alternative approaches.
Huang’s company is the biggest maker of artificial intelligence accelerators – the chips at the heart of a huge data centre buildout – and he’s one of the most prominent advocates for the broader AI industry.
At an event earlier this week, he held an onstage phone call with US president Donald Trump where they pushed back against the idea that AI development should be slowed.
Meta’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said on Tuesday that labs should rely on independent evaluators and advisers to ensure that AI models are safe.
The debate has grown more intense in recent days, especially after Anthropic’s Dario Amodei published a 3,800-word essay endorsing the slowdown. That followed the high-profile resignation of an Anthropic employee, who said the company and rival OpenAI were “gambling with our lives” because their technology could become a threat to humanity.
Huang said Tuesday that companies can decide not to release things that are harmful.
“Safety is paramount,” he said. “In a lot of ways, it’s job one. However, safety is an engineering problem.”
If we reach a point when “the company is out of control and the product’s not going to be safe, take a pause and make sure you get it right,” he said. – Bloomberg
