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Sam Altman rolled out a new project to distinguish humans from increasingly smart robots this week, highlighting the OpenAI founder’s belief that breakthroughs in artificial intelligence will soon create new challenges for society — and his conviction that he can solve them.
The launch of the eye-scanning cryptocurrency project Worldcoin is the latest in a string of advances at companies backed or led by Altman. This includes OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in November last year and the announcement this month that Oklo, a nuclear fission start-up chaired by Altman, is to go public in a deal valuing the company at $850mn.
“These are independent parts of a specific vision of the future which I believe in,” said Altman in an interview with the Financial Times. “But they’re all doing their own things and they all work independently.”
Collectively, Altman’s projects could reshape society and their success would place him at the heart of a powerful network of companies. Those efforts have shot the 38-year-old to global prominence while also putting put him on a collision course with regulators.
Altman insisted he had no intention of “disintermediating” governments but suggested the public sector had “a lack of will” to lead innovation.
“People ask me periodically, ‘don’t you think this should be done by the government? Isn’t it horrible that you are doing this as a private tech company?’,” he said. “Why don’t you ask the government why they aren’t doing these things, isn’t that the horrible part?’”
Microsoft-backed OpenAI is working to develop artificial general intelligence — advanced computer systems capable of performing at or above the level of humans in a range of tasks, a goal Altman has said could be met within a decade.
Plans for Worldcoin include creating a global identification system by scanning users’ eyeballs to help distinguish them from robots and providing the infrastructure to distribute a whole range of financial services and social aid, including universal basic income.
Altman has also invested in Retro Biosciences, a start-up aiming to lengthen human life, and Neuralink, a business co-founded by Elon Musk that is developing a computer that can be implanted into the brain.
He has bristled at the suggestion that he is manoeuvring to be at the centre of a universe dominated by AI or that he is acting for financial reward.
Altman has said he has no direct equity stake in OpenAI and only an “immaterial” holding in the company through Y Combinator, the start-up incubator he ran from 2014 to 2019. He is independently wealthy, holding stakes in some of Silicon Valley’s most successful start-ups including payments company Stripe and social network Reddit.
In a 2021 paper entitled “Moore’s Law for Everything”, Altman argued that the advent of AGI would create huge wealth by lowering the cost of labour to almost nothing and by pushing the boundaries of science by making original discoveries. That could facilitate breakthroughs for other companies he has invested in such as Oklo and Helion, which is working on nuclear fusion, or Neuralink.
Altman said he was playing such a prominent role in bringing new technologies forward in part because governments had shied away from leading the latest wave of innovation.
Brandishing part of a Concorde he keeps in his office, Altman said government capacity for innovation had ebbed since the UK and France collaborated to create the supersonic plane and the US launched the Apollo space missions.
“In a well functioning society, governments would be doing the AGI project and [nuclear] fusion and a whole bunch of things — and yet they’re not.
“So we either sit around and watch the gradual decline of state capacity and say ‘that’s a bummer’ and we’re just not going to have any more technical progress . . . or you do the next best thing and just build great companies,” he said.
Altman, who describes himself as “an extremely, extremely proud American citizen”, has spent more and more time in Washington this year, making his case to Congress and at the White House as he seeks to build trust and explain the ramifications of AGI.
“After the response to ChatGPT and people taking AGI seriously, absolutely we owed them the time to answer any questions they had,” he said.
Last week, OpenAI and other companies in the space agreed to let their systems be externally tested before being launched to the public, in a move the White House said would “help move towards safe, secure and transparent development of AI technology.”
Earlier this month, the US Federal Trade Commission told OpenAI it was investigating whether people have been harmed by ChatGPT’s creation of false information about them, as well as whether the company has engaged in “unfair or deceptive” privacy and data security practices.
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OpenAI has also come up against regulators in the EU, which are drafting some of the most comprehensive set of rules currently available for the technology. In May this year, Altman appeared to fire a warning shot at Brussels, suggesting his company could pull its services from the EU if regulation was too tough.
“We will try to comply, but if we can’t comply we will cease operating,” warned Altman, who later rowed back on the comments.
Worldcoin has also run up against US regulators. The company has chosen not to issue tokens in the US amid a crackdown on digital assets in the country, led by the Securities and Exchange Commission. In recent months the chief financial markets watchdog has taken enforcement action against the biggest names in crypto, including Nasdaq-listed exchange Coinbase, and Binance, the largest exchange in the world.
“It is really sad,” said Altman. “Of course we’re going to follow the law. I hope that there’s more clarity in the US over time and a more friendly environment but that’s what we’re going to have to do for now.”
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