Sam Altman: AI Beyond Human Control “Absolutely Possible” | Titans and Disruptors

Sam Altman (0:00)

Right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public.

Alyson Shontell (0:03)

So it sounds like not 2026, 2027

Sam Altman (0:05)

I would say not 2026, yeah. We got a lot of stuff to do.

Alyson Shontell (0:08)

We're here in the San Francisco headquarters of OpenAI to speak with Sam Altman after a really busy week that has a lot of people very concerned about the safety of AI and the possibility of civilization collapse.

Sam Altman (0:21)

I think it is unacceptable to be taking a 10% chance of killing everybody by the end of the decade, obviously.

Alyson Shontell (0:26)

We're gonna talk with Sam about his actual thoughts on that. Where the technology is today and what needs to happen to create safe AI that can benefit all of humanity. I'm Alyson Shontell, and this is Fortune 500 Titans and Disruptors of Industry.

Sam Altman, thank you so much for spending time with me today after a wild week of news.

Sam Altman (0:50)

They're all wild now.

Alyson Shontell (0:52)

I bet so. How are you feeling about the AI future today?

Sam Altman (0:55)

I feel like I've had years slash almost a decade to get ready for this and kind of we've had time to collectively wrap our heads around it. This has clearly been a week where a lot more people are grappling with the issues in front of us. So I'm actually mostly grateful that that's happening. I think that this is a conversation that the world is overdue for.

And we are clearly entering a realm of extremely capable models and a high stakes and a need to get things right.

Alyson Shontell (1:31)

So your mission at OpenAI, and I'll talk about a little bit about what happened this week, that feels like this is a pivotal moment.

But the guiding mission of OpenAI is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity. And for people who don't know what AGI is, it means artificial general intelligence. And the working definition, to my understanding, is that AI gets to the point where it outperforms humans at most economically viable work. You agree?

Sam Altman (1:54)

Yes, although I will say that many people have very different definitions of AGI.

And I think the important point is just like extremely capable models and getting kind of too hung up on the like, well, is it exactly this or exactly that is a, you can kind of lose the magnitude of what's happening. If there's too much focus on the pedantic, like, are we there? Are we not there? What's missing? Like we are clearly today in a point on the curve with great potential and real risk.

Alyson Shontell (2:24)

And your latest model, Astra, is very powerful to the point where your co-founder, Greg Brockman, declared, welcome to the AGI era. Jensen Huang of NVIDIA also called it AGI. So we're at this interesting moment, but ensuring that it benefits all of humanity is definitely not a given. And we got a sense of that online this week when a former OpenAI employee, Jacob Coxson, went viral for saying he was quitting his job at Anthropic because the people building AI earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade. And then one of his other Anthropic buddies chimed in and said, he's totally right, we do earnestly believe that. And it could be by greater than 10% chance that it kills us all by the end of the decade.

Are they right?

Sam Altman (3:10)

I think it is unacceptable to be taking like a 10% chance of killing everybody by the end of the decade, obviously.

I think the people that are working at these efforts have a huge amount of power and ability to impact what happens here. We have been taking a number of actions. We've reached this new capability level to ensure that we do not take a risk on behalf of humanity like that. And I don't think anybody else should either. We've had moments before, again, this is more capable model higher stakes than ever before. We've had moments before where we've had to say, okay, our models have reached a new level of capability. There's a new set of risks. We need to increase our alignment work, our monitoring work, our safety stack in general, to be able to mitigate the risks in front of us.

We need new policy. We need new coordination between labs. And this is another moment where we need more of that. There's obviously tremendous benefit, but I think people have been talking about that for a long time. And I also think it is true what we say, which is we will be able to use these increasingly powerful models to ensure that we can do the safety work and the safety research that we need. And there's, you know, everything else that we could talk about about, you know, we need to get there before our adversaries do. But I actually don't think that's right in this moment. I think in this moment, we are entering a new era, and we, like we have as we've stepped into other new eras in the past, act differently to ensure that we are doing something that will be ensure the AGI benefits all of humanity, but also ensure that no one is taking risk anywhere close to that. I think it can simultaneously be true that if the world and the companies building this technology did not do things any differently, they've been doing them in the past, there might be significant risk. But it would be insane not to adjust the way we all work, and the way that we make decisions, and the way that our governments understand and put guardrails around this technology in light of that.