'Scary part of artificial intelligence is...,' OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tells Bill Gates

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is concerned about one thing related to artificial intelligence it is the rapid penetration of the technology in the society and the speed of adapting it. In an interview with Microsoft co founder Bill Gates in a podcast Altman said that unlike other past technological revolutions, the AI revolution will be 'fastest by far'.

Calling it a scary thing, Altman said it will force society to adapt faster than ever. "We’ve seen that with the great technological revolutions of the past. Each technological revolution has gotten faster, and this will be the fastest by far. That’s the part that I find potentially a little scary, is the speed with which society is going to have to adapt, and that the labour market will change," the OpenAI CEO said in podcast.

Further on robotics and blue collar jobs, Altman said that he has started investing in robotics companies. "At some point, we will be able to use our models with their language understanding and future video understanding," he added. Currently, AI systems are doing tasks but not jobs. However, Altman said in the future AI will take some of the jobs, and will find new and better jobs as well.

Altman told Gates, "I totally believe that if you give people way more powerful tools, it’s not just that they can work a little faster, they can do qualitatively different things. Right now, maybe we can speed up a programmer 3x". Talking about the milestones in the next two years, Altman said the progress will be around reasoning ability and reliability.

"Currently, GPT 4 most questions 10,000 times, one of those 10,000 is probably pretty good, but it doesn’t always know which one, and you’d like to get the best response of 10,000 each time, and so that increase in reliability will be important," Altman said. Other areas of improvement on Chat GPT 4 will be regarding customisability and personalisation.

"The ability to know about you, your email, your calendar, how you like appointments booked, connected to other outside data sources…Those will be some of the most important areas of improvement," Altman told Gates. According to Altman, AI technology will impact society and, the geopolitical balance of power, and therefore, he said, a global regulatory body that looks at those super powerful systems is the need of the hour.

"This (AI) needs a global agency of some sort, because of the potential for global impact. I think that could make sense. There will be a lot of shorter term issues, issues of what are these models allowed to say and not say. How do we think about copyright? Different countries are going to think about those differently", Altman said.

Altman said many heads of state of various countries have backed the idea of AI and regulating the technology. Altman advised the listeners of the podcast to be clear on what they want to do in their lives and take risks. "A lot of people get trapped in spending their time in not the way they want to do.

Probably the most frequent advice I give is to try to fix that some way or other," he said. ChatGPT, a chatbot which can generate human like responses based on user prompts, has helped AI's popularity in the recent times. Microsoft has committed to invest over $10 billion in OpenAI. The company is in early talks to raise a fresh round of funding at a valuation at or above $100 billion.

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