Sam Altman on AI Democratization & Power Concerns

New Delhi, Feb 19 (PTI) OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Thursday said he shares concerns about the concentration of AI power in the hands of a country or a company, and believes that the only path forward is to "heavily democratise" the technology and put tools in the hands of people, even if it comes with challenges and downsides.

Responding to a question from PTI, Altman said that all my study of history suggests that concentrating all of the AI power in the hands of one company or country, even if it was in the name of safety, would be a "disastrously bad" thing to do.

"I do share the concern about concentration of AI. Our stance is that the only path forward is to heavily democratise AI and to put these tools in the hands of people, even if it comes with some downsides, even if it means that society has got to wrestle with some big challenges," he said at a select briefing on the sidelines of AI Summit.


OpenAI, he said, invented the strategy called iterative deployment that allows people to become familiar with AI innovations, use it even when it's imperfect, even when it has flaws.

"And it doesn't mean we aren't responsible how we do it, doesn't mean that we don't start conservatively, but it does mean that we empower people to do things with the technology that we ourselves might not like...It means that we try to encourage a robust ecosystem being built around the world," he said.

It means that we we take the trade of empowering people and accepting that society is going to have to wrestle with a new thing, rather than try to hold on all the power for ourselves and say, we can guarantee this or that outcome," he said.