Sam Altman warns about the potential dangers of AI in the future - and it’s utterly terrifying

Sam Altman was one of the leaders of three major artificial intelligence firms who warned about the possible dangers of artificial intelligence in the future at the UN, and his comments are pretty terrifying.

Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was one of the figures who spoke about how rapidly evolving AI models could soon self-improve and prove a risk to global security by bypassing human oversight.

Altman was speaking alongside Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Hugging Face co-founder Clément Delangue at the UN Security Council on Wednesday (September 23).

He said: "We could lose control of the future to AI. The risk is that it moves so fast that people can no longer follow what's happening or intervene when needed. This would obviously be terrible."

"If AI is to be democratic, the most important decisions cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone. They must be shaped through democratic processes and by governments accountable to the people they serve," Altman told the council. "At the international level, this will require cooperation."

"In our history, there have been times where countries who compete and don’t always like each other very much still come together for shared interests and the collective good in the face of a powerful new technology. We believe this must be one of those times," he said.

Earlier this year, Altman was criticised over comments made about the technology’s energy consumption – comparing it to humans.

He also previously received pushback online after suggesting ways people could use the company’s new product ChatGPT Work when parenting their kids.

Altman recently took to X/Twitter to suggest that people create podcasts about their children to play on the way to school – and it didn’t go down particularly well with everyone on social media.

Why not read…?

• OpenAI’s Sam Altman slammed over ‘dystopian’ comments on ChatGPT’s energy consumption
• Pushback as Sam Altman shares ChatGPT parenting suggestion: ‘Just talk to your kids’

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