OpenAI’s Altman Sheds Skepticism About Global AI Coordination

OpenAI’s CEO said he is more confident about a worldwide effort to regulate artificial intelligence (AI).

Sam Altman has been on a global tour to drum up interest in his company’s generative AI technology, Reuters reported Monday (June 12).

“I came to the trip … skeptical that it was going to be possible in the short term to get global cooperation to reduce existential risk, but I am now wrapping up the trip feeling quite optimistic we can get it done,” Altman told students in Tokyo, per the report.

Altman’s comments came amid a global effort to create regulations to govern the use of generative AI, while also trying to capitalize on the technology’s growing reach.

It was reported over the weekend that both the president of France and prime minister of the U.K. were promoting their countries as major players in the AI race.

At the same time, the “existential threat” Altman spoke of is something that’s been warned about by AI critics and Altman himself.

Late last month, OpenAI published a research paper designed to provide a strategy for dealing with AI “hallucinations,” the term for when the technology fabricates information entirely.

“Even state-of-the-art models still produce logical mistakes, often called hallucinations,” the paper stated. “Mitigating hallucinations is a critical step towards building aligned AGI (artificial general intelligence).”

As noted in “Preparing for a Generative AI World,” a PYMNTS and AI-ID collaboration, there is so far no simple way to differentiate AI-generated content from authentic materials.

But while hallucination remains an endemic issue, it’s obvious that generative AI models are sticking around and will impact most, if not all, business sectors and industries, making effective regulation of the technology a critical concern.

AI-ID founder and CEO Shaunt Sarkissian told PYMNTS in an interview last month that, from a regulatory standpoint, there is a need to develop an arena where everyone can compete but still face some level of control to “ensure that the technology is not destructive.”

That’s because generative AI has the potential to create a new data layer, similar to what HTTP did in the 1990s. As with any new data layer or protocol, governance, rules and standards need to be applied, Sarkissian told PYMNTS.