Sam Altman has played down the threat posed by artificial intelligence, saying the technology would be able to mirror the capability of humans sooner than the average person realizes but would “matter much less” than many predicted.
The chief executive of OpenAI told The New York Times’s DealBook conference in New York City that the company would release increasingly powerful technologies over the next 12 months and hinted that it could achieve artificial general intelligence, when a machine can do almost anything a human brain can, in the next few years.
But he pushed back against the gloomy warnings about the threat A.I. posed. “A lot of the safety concerns that we and others expressed actually don’t come at the A.G.I. moment,” he said, adding that the technology would significantly accelerate economic growth.
Mr. Altman’s comments are deeply intertwined with OpenAI’s ability to survive as a business. The company’s largest investor is Microsoft, which has pumped more than $13 billion into the start-up and holds an exclusive license to use OpenAI’s raw A.I. technologies. But tensions have risen in recent months, and the contract between the two companies says that Microsoft would lose this license if OpenAI’s board unilaterally decides that it has created an A.G.I.
OpenAI also faces growing competition from several rivals, including Elon Musk and his start-up xAI. Mr. Musk co-founded OpenAI as a not-for-profit entity before falling out with Mr. Altman. But he has sued the company, accusing it of putting commercial interests ahead of the public good, and violating the company’s founding charter.
Mr. Altman said he was “tremendously sad” about the rising tensions between the two one-time collaborators.
“I grew up with Elon as like a mega hero,” he said.
But he rejected suggestions that Mr. Musk could use his increasingly close relationship with President-elect Trump to harm OpenAI.
“I believe pretty strongly that Elon will do the right thing and that it would be profoundly un-American to use political power to the degree that Elon would hurt competitors and advantage his own businesses,” he said.
OpenAI ignited an A.I. investment boom in late 2022 with the release of ChatGPT, its chatbot, spurring venture capitalists and big tech companies to pour billions of dollars into the field. In October, OpenAI closed a $6.6 billion fund-raising deal that nearly doubled its valuation to $157 billion.
(The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023 for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The companies deny the claims.)
Even so, OpenAI expects to lose roughly $5 billion because of the high costs related to developing A.I. and may need to raise more money. To make itself more attractive to investors, OpenAI is working to turn itself into a for-profit enterprise.
Mr. Musk’s lawsuit claims that OpenAI, Mr. Altman and Greg Brockman, another co-founder, breached the company’s founding contract and his lawyers want to block the company from transforming itself into a for-profit company.
Mr. Musk’s suit also argues that OpenAI has illegally tried to prevent its investors from also putting money into xAI. Mr. Altman said this was “incorrect.” But he indicated that OpenAI has worked to ensure that its private research is not shared with competitors.
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