Interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on FOX News Sunday

Shannon Bream: Let’s talk. Best case and worst case scenario, because you’ve been honest about the potential harm that could come from AI. What should we know?

Sam Altman: Society’s been through things like this many, many times. You know, we’ve been through the industrial revolution. But the computer revolution, one thing that I think you can learn studying history is it’s not always obvious what the pluses and minuses are going to be. But I’ll tell you, our current best guess on the plus side, people are using these tools already today as AI medical advisors, you hear from people who they couldn’t diagnose some disease they had and they had all these weird symptoms and Chat GPT helped them. You hear from people who are using this is like an AI tutor. They’re learning things they couldn’t learn before. I hear people who are using this to help run their small business, really wonderful things and this is a tool that magnifies human ability in all these ways. I think we’re at the very early ends of that and we’ll see incredible things. There’s hundreds of millions of people using this already. There will be billions. And like with any other tool, people will be able to do things they just couldn’t do before. And that really is, I think, how the world society gets better and better on the downside. You know, to get right at it. I’m sure this will impact jobs. Many jobs it’ll make better and more productive, but some it’ll make worse and some will go away entirely. You can imagine cybersecurity incidents with these models where people use them to hack into systems. You can imagine our adversaries getting a hold of these and it being a national security issue. So I think we have a lot of work to do and we really need to stay in the lead.

Shannon Bream: So you talk about this will enable people to do things they couldn’t do, but what about things they shouldn’t do? How much do you worry about that?

Sam Altman: Well, I think that’s part of building the tools. And there are all sorts of things that you could imagine people using this technology for that for what we build. We don’t want it used that way. And we try very hard to make sure that you can’t use it for some of the obvious negative things you could do with them.

Sam Altman: As this technology advances, we understand that people are anxious about how it could change the way we live. We are too.

Shannon Bream: You’ve testified on the Hill. You stay in touch with lawmakers. Do you think they’re the ones to add the guardrails? Is it up to the developers who’s role?

Sam Altman: I think it should be a question for society. Like it should not be OpenAI gets to decide on its own how ChatGPT or how the technology in general is used or not used. But we do have a responsibility to do the best that we can before that happens. So as society gets more experience with these tools, which will take, you know, years and years, I think it will become clearer what the standards should be. In the meantime, we have to make some decisions should our tool respond this way or that way to a certain query? Should you be allowed to use it for this thing which could be good or could be bad? And one thing that we try to do is publish at least what our stances are so that people can tell when it’s just a bug because the technology is still somewhat early. And when it’s a decision we’ve made that people may disagree with so that we can debate that and perhaps change it.

Shannon Bream: You think Congress needs to legislate those guardrails, the restrictions, regulate it?

Sam Altman: I think, yes. At some point when it is what form it should be, I don’t know when that will happen. But any technology of this magnitude, I would expect there to be legislation about at some point.

Shannon Bream: So there is a new incoming administration and people have said they’re not sure where President elect Trump is on some of this stuff. He’s talked a lot, which I want to talk to you about, the race against China and making sure that we stay ahead of them. In fact, you tweeted about that after his election. You said it is critically important that the U.S. maintains its lead in developing AI with democratic values.

Sam Altman: Yeah

Shannon Bream: He very much wants to stay ahead of China. They’re not going to have the same values in regulating AI that we will. So where do we go in this race with China?

Sam Altman: And infrastructure in the United States is super important. AI is a little bit different than other kinds of software in that it requires massive amounts of infrastructure, power, computer chips, data centers, and we need to build that here and we need to be able to have the best AI infrastructure in the world to be able to lead with the the technology and the capabilities. I believe President elect Trump will be very good at that. Look forward to working with his administration on it. It does seem to us like this is going to be very important. It does seem like this will be one of these unusually important moments in the history of technology. And we very much believe that the United States and our allies need to lead this.

Shannon Bream: You mentioned what it takes land, electricity, water, cooling, the heat that comes from these productions there communities that are raising concerns about that, they are worried about the impact on their lives.

Sam Altman: First of all, we are making enormous efficiency gains. And so this idea that, you know, you need all the energy on earth probably won’t be true. One thing we hear again and again is some communities don’t want data centers or chip facilities or new power plants, and some really do. And I think the United States is a gigantic country and there will be plenty of room to do this.

Shannon Bream: We’ve got incoming vice president J.D. Vance. He’s a senator. He’s been there Where you when you’ve testified, he’s talked about those who have. Raised huge concerns. Worries about air is going to kill everybody and take over the human race and replace us. She says they’re asking for regulations that would entrench the tech incumbents that we actually have and make it actually harder for new entrants to be able to create the innovation that’s going to power the next generation of American growth. So he seems to be in conflict with some of what we’ve heard from President elect Trump about regulating, not regulating if regulation ends up benefiting the big companies that are already a part of this game.

Sam Altman: First of all, we were the little up and comer very recently. So I think it’s very important to the American innovation economy and our position in the world that we allow our small companies to do what they do. I think one of the most special things about this country is our ability to repeatedly lead the way on innovation and repeatedly figure out the future of technology, of science, of progress and benefit from the enormous growth that happens with that. And we can look at some of our friends around the world and see very clear evidence of how bad it is if you stop having that. So it’s we really need that. We really, as a country, don’t want to do anything to impede our smaller companies or make it more difficult for them. And we clearly have had a regulatory overreach there as a country. But I think the big companies can handle it a little bit better. And if we’re if we’re right that the systems are as powerful as we think they’re going to be, then I think most Americans will say, yeah, you know, some oversight on that is a good idea.

Shannon Bream: Where are we on the spectrum of getting to where AI is making its own autonomous decisions.

Sam Altman: As its capabilities go up? Maybe right now you can give it a five second task without supervision and eventually you give it a five minute task and then a five hour task and then a five day task. And maybe someday it can go to a five month task. And that’s like a, you know, full scientist off exploring something. But I think it’ll feel more like that. It’ll feel more like an increasingly senior coworker. Not one moment. It was not autonomous. And then one. Moment it was,.

Shannon Bream: Yeah, because I think a lot of people who don’t understand and I would put myself in that category I got a basic understanding, but they worry about A.I. becoming sentient about it, making autonomous decisions about it, telling humans you’re no longer in charge.

Sam Altman: It doesn’t seem to me to be kind of where things are heading. I don’t I think, you know, is it conscious or not? Will not be the right question, but it will be like how complex of a task can it do on its own?

Shannon Bream: What about when the tool gets smarter than we are or the tool decides to take over? Because you seem very calm and chill about the future and optimistic that we are going to be able to handle this responsibly.

Sam Altman: I think. Tools in many senses are already smarter than we are. I think that the internet is smarter than you or I. The Internet knows a lot of things. In fact, society itself is obviously vastly smarter and more capable than any one person. So I think we’re already good at. Working with tools, institutions, structures, whatever you want to call it, that are vastly more capable than one person. And as long as we have a reasonable, reasonably level playing field where it’s not like one person or one company gets vastly more powerful than everybody else, I think we know how to deal with that.

Shannon Bream: Did your brain always work like this? Did you ever feel like I think about the world and I think about the possibilities in maybe a different way than other kids in my third grade class?

Sam Altman: I grew up in Saint Louis, in the West, in the in a time when technology was like not such a thing. And we did have some computers in my third grade class, but most kids didn’t like them that much and I thought they were super cool. Yeah, I mean, I was like a nerdy, shy kid that probably liked sci fi much more than the average kid did. But I. I never in any realistic sense thought any of this would happen to me and feel very grateful.

Shannon Bream: What do you think will be kind of your legacy?

Sam Altman: I will hopefully not think about that for a long time. You know, it’s a I think there are all these, like deep philosophical questions. And right now I just kind of like work as hard as I can each day until I get tired and then collapse in bed. And the thinking about legacy feels impossibly far off still. I view sort of human progress as this one long exponential curve where we all get to build on the work people have done before us and the people that come after us get to build further on the work that we’ve done. And I think our legacy, like OpenAI, we got to put in one pretty important layer of scaffolding and that’s like a tremendous honor. And what excites me the most, to the degree there’s a legacy here for us at all, is that the things that people can do with this new tool that we help discover, I think will astonish us.

Shannon Bream: Well, thank you for taking a break from all of that for us.

Sam Altman: Thank you very much.

VIDEO LINK: https://www.foxnews.com/video/6365384006112

Interview by Shannon Bream of Fox News.
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