Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, recently visited the World Government Summit and spoke about the future of artificial intelligence. During the live event, he discussed the potential impact of large language models and AI systems like CH GPT on humanity. Altman emphasized the potential benefits of making intelligence broadly available and inexpensive, stating that abundant intelligence, along with abundant energy, could unlock a future that is difficult to imagine.
Altman also highlighted the positive impact of large language models in education and government services, noting that governments embracing and experimenting with the technology can deliver services to citizens more efficiently. He explained that while the current technology has some value, it is still at a primitive stage, likening it to the first cell phones with limited capabilities. Altman stressed the importance of pushing forward to develop larger and more advanced models, ultimately aiming to deliver transformative applications that can change the world.
The event provided valuable insights into the future of AI and the potential impact of large language models, sparking new discussions on the possibilities and challenges of advancing AI technology for the benefit of humanity.
Watch the video by Reuters
Video Transcript
If you’re interested in joining if you figure out how to do that please let me know I’d be very curious yeah sometimes you read the news and you um really feel how audacious people can be but um I think if we’re just going to come into the hearing now and the topics
That really matter for Humanity let’s talk about large language models and AI systems and CH GPT more specifically I want to start off time by asking you what drives you to create these systems why did you embark on this journey and you know why are you doing what you’re
Doing look we we have a long way to go and a lot to prove but I think if we can get if we can fulfill our mission uh if we can even get close to it the the benefits to humanity of making intelligence broadly available uh
Inexpensive and sort of as a tool to let Humanity build the future I think is quite remarkable I think abundant intelligence and closely related to that abundant energy can un unlock a future that is is is sort of difficult for me to even imagine how how good it could be
Uh and I think right now we don’t realize how limited we are um by the limits on intelligence and how expensive it is and how difficult it is but if you imagine a world where everyone gets a great personal tutor great personalized medical advice we can use these tools to
Discover all sorts of new science cure diseases heal the environment discover new physics who knows what else uh I think that’s pretty remarkable and also just speaking personally I think this is like the most exciting Quest Frontier I can imagine being on and and how close are we to div
Vision if you’re going to talk about the drug Discovery curing cancer using um not CH GPT but large language models to try to solve some of the biggest physics questions chemistry questions biology questions of Our Lives how far off are we so the honest answer of course is is
We really don’t know you know this is this new science we’re discovering new things all all the time the rate of discovery is incredible the rate of change is incredible but it it’s sort of hard to know exactly how far we have to go what I will say though is we hear all
The time from scientists who say that our tools make them much more productive and they don’t have an easy way to quantify that but they say it’s substantial we also don’t know how much that difference you know if you could make every scientist on Earth twice as
Productive what that would mean for the rate of science ific Discovery because this is all so new this is like you know a little bit more than a year old but we’ll find out so I’d like to just um touch upon the uae’s experience here because we did
Talk about this when we were together in person a few weeks ago uh we’ve seen that the deployment of large language models and CH GPT in specific actually did not increase cheating rates in universities it was actually a great enabler for students for professors we’ve seen as well that when the
Government Embraces these systems and talks about them positively the the public utilized them in the right way so we launched a guide to help people understand how to use these tools effectively and how to be more productive with them as well as probably put some guidelines against what they
Shouldn’t be used for what is the best government application that you’ve seen what’s something that you think uh is a is a model for other governments to follow in this domain so first of all you you touched on something that you sort of glossed
Over but I want to I want to spend a second on it because I think it’s informative to what’s happening um which was about education and cheating in schools and when chat gbt first came out uh you know the whole world had a moment of adjustment but the first thing that
Happened is at least in United States in my experience school districts were falling all over themselves to ban chbt the fastest and declare it know this existential threat to education and other people got concerned later but it really started with education education was also the place It reversed the quickest teachers and
School districts embraced it and said you know hey this is part of the future this is something that we all want this is going to help our students learn better and I I really believe this will be the most this already is uh and certainly will be one of the most
Transformative Technologies for Education we’ve had in in recent times and I think that leads into your question well about governments because there are all of these things that people were afraid of or maybe are still afraid of about large language models in the eye but governments who embrace it
And say let’s find ways to help this deliver services for our citizens better let’s think about ways we can reform how the government does its job how people fill out forms or do whatever they need to do how the government helps provide education Healthcare as we discussed
Earlier that seems to be working really well and the governments that are saying let’s lean in let’s experiment with this let’s embrace it let’s you know make it available to our government to our citizens that I think is the best thing to do right now and just say like hey
We’re all figuring this out together we’re all writing the rule book together but let’s lean in and try it there’s um a thought that says you have ch gpt3 which blew people away you had 3.5 which was a huge Improvement you have GPT 4 that also took us to the next
Level and now you’re working on GPT 5 the proliferation of the technology is still limited so we’re still using it in very specific domain very specific use cases we we haven’t really seen the proper applications that are world changing why are we continuing to push across the bigger the better you know
The the larger models that we’re seeing right now what’s the logic behind that can you explain that to us well I think for that exact reason as you said we have not yet seen as much world changing uh application as we’ like maybe we’ve seen some um there are a lot of people
Who use these services and get value out of them but but not as much as we’d like and and I think the reason is um the current technology that we have is like I mean it’s like that very first cell phone with the black and white screen that can only display those like
Numbers and you know it just didn’t do much but there was enough in there you’re like H I can make a call that’s that’s cool and at the time that seems great and then it took us I don’t know how long from that but many decades from
That to the iPhones we have today and the thing we have today is incredible and it took a massive amount of scaling in all these different ways to get there um but we have now is like unimaginable at the time of those like first primitive cell phones and I think that’s
That’s why we have to push forward we’re at this barely useful cell phone but people still like making phone calls it turns out and if you can make a better way for them to do it so they can go walk around the world while they do it
Sure that’s great but that’s not what we want to deliver we want to deliver the iPhone 16 or 15 or whatever the current one is and what’s the timeline to reach the iPhone 16 from the current Motorola that we have you got to give give us you
Got to be a little patient that’s like a you know it took the world a while to do that last time around so give us some time but I will say I think in a few more years it’ll be much better than it is now and in a decade it should be pretty
Remarkable and if we’re going to compare um gp4 to GPT 5 uh because you’re at the cusp of this you’re actually seeing it at the Forefront what is the difference like if I’m excited about gp5 what should I be excited about I I was sort of laughing a little
Bit because this is going to sound like a annoying answer but I think it is the important part it’s going to be smarter there are all of these other things you know we can talk about it’ll be better at these kind of tasks it’ll be multimodal it’ll be faster what you
Know who knows what but the the thing that I think really matters is it’s going to be smarter and this is a bigger deal than it sounds right because the what what makes these models so magical is that they’re they’re General um and so if it’s a little bit better if it’s a
Little bit smarter that means it’s a little bit better at everything and the thing that I think is most exciting is it’s not like this model is going to get a little better at this task and not really better at these or you know it’s not that it’s it’s because we’re going
To make the model smarter it’s going to be better at everything across the board have you watched the movie Freaky Friday where these two people switch places I’ve heard of it but I haven’t watched it so so the the thesis or the idea of the movie was two people
Switched places they moved into different bodies and they lived each other’s lives let’s assume today is um freaky Tuesday and you become the minister of artificial intelligence of the UAE if you were going to take one regulatory decision for this country knowing what you know seeing what you
See what would you do does that mean you have to take my job for a day I would I would love to do that just for a day you have fun with that it’s not as easy as it looks no no I know it’s very hard but
I’d love to experience it that’d be great um and anytime you want to switch I I I will greatly look forward to that um what I would do uh that was a curveball by the way no no no it’s it’s a really thoughtful question I’m trying to give a thoughtful answer
Um I I think what I would do is try to and I know you’ve done some work in this direction and I I really appreciate it but I I would try to find a way to create more of a regulatory sandbox where people could experiment with this technology
And and and be able to figure out sort of like dream imagine whatever you want to call it what the world could look like um and then I would try to see what makes sense and what doesn’t and write the regulation around that I think it’s
Very hard I think we have to try and we’re going to anyway but I think it’s very hard to get all of the regulatory ideas right in a vacuum um and if there were was a sort of contained way that I could find a way to like give people the
Future and let them experiment it with it uh and then see what made sense uh what what went really wrong what really right and write the regulation around that that that seems like an interesting experiment so I have great news um we already have a platform here called the
Reg laab that does that the only issue is I think it hasn’t proliferated yet to be truly Global um one thing that I think we should do is actually look at how we can take it to the next level and use a specific use case there for AI rather than just broad Technologies
Right can I change my answer I thought one you can change your answer 100 times go on I still think that’s a good thing to do but since I only have one day a better thing to do okay um one thing that I have been thinking about so the
World is going to try all of these different regulatory approaches there will be your sandbox I think it’s awesome that you have that other people do other things um but we are going to and I I think that’s actually really good but we are going to need I believe
At some point some sort of global system um the example that I’ve given in the past is the iaea the inational atomic energy Agency for what happens with the most powerful of these systems because they will have truly Global impact and what sort of auditing what sort of
Safety measures do we want in place before you can deploy like a super intelligence or you know however you want to call an AGI and I think for a bunch of reasons the UAE would be so well set up to be a leader in the discussions around that I would I would
Like host a one-day conference with leaders from around the world to brainstorm about that consider it done we’ll do it um thank you I’d love the come I’d like to just move on to the regulatory issue so um I remember the first time we had this conversation on artificial intelligence or regulating AI
The dangers the opportunities was if I’m not mistaken was it 2017 uh that we met in LA when um yes you hosted that or 16 either 16 or 17 one of those years and and we were having a discussion and you actually uh put forward a vision for AI
That’s going to change the world alongside Elon Musk and a few others and you also mentioned some of the dangers there are a lot of efforts today on regulation there are efforts by the UN there are efforts by the G20 by the G7 and others in terms of these efforts are
They hitting the mark you think is there something else that we me to do we have a lot of people here that represent International organizations and that represent governments what more should we do and if it’s doing well how can we make it even better Frankly Speaking I think we’re
Still on the stage and this is not necessarily bad but we’re still in the stage of a lot of discussion so there’s you know everybody in the world is having a conference everybody’s got an idea a policy paper and that’s okay I think we’re still at a time where debate
Is needed and healthy but at some point in the next few years I think we have to move towards like an action plan with with real buyin around the world C can you elaborate a little bit on that like exactly what is what is necessary to make that
Happen I honestly don’t think that is for open eye to say um I mean we have a lot of ideas we’ve tried to contribute them the discussion I think a lot of other people have a lot of ideas this is a big thing like this is going to touch
All of us and this is going to I I I am very high conviction that we can manage our way through this but it’s going to take a great deal of collaboration um and it’s going to take the our leaders of the world coming together and you
Know it’s that’s I think not for us to set maybe um another thing that we can just jump to quickly if we’re going to talk about governments that do not have the resources of a company like open AI or a country like the UAE countries that
Are limited and the resources and the um let’s say directions that they can take on these things what advice do you have for them on the llm race right now what should they do should they use in your opinion closed Source or open source tools should we choose sides or should
We just go for the best application and the best utility how would you go about this we’re giving this a lot of thought we’re trying to you know we want to have like an offering um that makes sense for countries that that want to have offer AI Services um but in the
Meantime I think what people are doing right now which is just sort of use these apis or run open source models I think that’ll make sense I think if I’m not mistaken you guys open source gpt3 is that correct gpt2 we did I don’t think three
Gpt2 okay is there a sense that you guys are going to open source the uh models as you launch launch new ones so for example as five comes along you’re going to open source three is that something that you guys are thinking about or is that not on the
Table I think you should expect us to open source more things over time but exactly what and when and how we’re trying to figure out there there are like great open source models open source language models out in the world now and you know I don’t think what the
World needs is like another similar model um so we’d like to do something that is helpful and new and we’re trying to figure out what that might be I I’d like to now just um jump into something that the fearmongers and the opportunists talk about what is the most
Thing that you fear when it comes to um the deployment of AI and the most thing you’re opportun you’re optimistic about like if I’m going to tell you what keeps you up at night and what keeps you going in the morning give me one reason for that and one reason for the
Other um the keep up at night is easy it’s all of the Sci-Fi stuff uh you know I think sci-fi writers are a very smart bunch and in in the Decades of sci-fi about AI uh there have been unbelievably creative ways to imagine that how this
Can go wrong and I think most of them are like comical but there’s some things in there that are easy to imagine where things really go wrong and I’m not that interested in like the Killer Robots walking down the street direction of things going wrong I much
More interested in the like very subtle societal misalignments where we just have these systems out in society and through no particular ill intention um things just go horribly wrong but the thing that wake me up in the morning with energy every day is what I actually
Believe is things are just going to go tremendously right we got to work hard to mitigate all of the the downside cases they are I think very significant and and and real potentials to confront front but the reason that we go think so hard about how to deploy this technology
Safely uh is the upside is is remarkable um I think we can easily imagine a world in the not super distant future where everybody’s got a better life than people have today I think we can raise the standard of living so incredibly much um if everybody has access to
Abundant amounts of really high quality intelligence and they can use that tool those tools to create whatever they want to do that’s like pretty amazing um I people I I this is like kind of how I think about it but people are like oh that doesn’t make any sense I’m going to
Say it anyway um if you think about everybody on Earth getting a the resources of a company of like hundreds of thousands of really competent people um and what that would do you know if you have like an AI programmer AI lawyer um AI marketer AI
Strategist and not just one of those but many of each and you get to sort of like decide how to use those to use that to kind of create whatever you want to create we’re all going to get a lot of great stuff the creative power of
Humanity with tools like that should be remarkable so uh that’s I think what gets us all up every morning my final question um let’s imagine that you’re sitting right now in front of a teenager in Turkey another teenager in the Middle East somewhere like let’s say qar or the
UA and someone that’s in Africa or Asia and they’re all asking you what should we do in the future how can we ensure that this doesn’t take our jobs how can we ensure that we are relevant in the AI age how can we uh be part of this future
That you just laid out that’s very OPP optimistic that’s extremely exciting what would you recommend they do should they study something as a specific domain should they take a certain course should we just play with the technology what advice do you have for them the first thing I would say is you are
Unbelievably lucky you are coming an age at probably the best time in human history you understand this technology young people are always the early adopters of Technology almost always but certainly in this case and you will be able to use these tools to do things that the people in the generation before
You couldn’t even imagine you will you will have your entire career uh flooded with opportunity and the ability to do amazing new things you’ll be able to start companies that are phenomenally more impactful and successful than people generation before you could you will live in this incredibly expansionary opportun like just flooded
With time of like massive massive opportunity and you can kind of go do whatever you want uh the I think the rule like the ground under us all is Shifting the rules are changing but the amount of value that will be created and the ability for an individual to express
Their Creative Vision and will uh it’s a great time thank you so much Sam for your time for your insights I we look forward to seeing you here in person in the coming Cycles thank you look forward to coming back soon thank you thank [Applause] you distinguished guests our next session is
Titled will AI lead us to our end with Dr Yan laon touring award laurate vice president and chief AI scientist at meta this session is moderated by Nate langson from Bloomberg Good morning everybody um it’s my very great pleasure to be here moderating this session with one of the world’s foremost AI Pioneers Dr Yan laon Chief AI scientist at meta and as a slight spoiler alert to answer the question posed by this session’s title uh the
Answer will be no uh that is what I I anticipate this is what we’ll we’ll probably be concluding um now interestingly on this stage yesterday the CEO of Nvidia Jensen hang um said that one of if not the most significant moments over the last year in AI was the
Release of llama 2 the open source model from from meta and also Falcon family developed here in the UAE so can you talk to us Jan about open source AI why is open source the way forward from a security and Innovation perspective so there’s going to be a future not very
Far in the future where all of our interaction with the digital world are going to be mediated by AI systems we already see this with u uh companies putting out basically replacement for search engines uh that are backed by AI systems and so in this in this future if all of
Our digital diet is mediated by AI systems um it’s going to be there’s going to be a need for a very wide diversity of AI systems that cater to different languages different cultures different value systems different centers of interest and it it can’t be produced by
A small number of companies on the west coast to the US um um or any single country um so essentially AI tools assistance will become kind of a repository of all human knowledge and um it’s going to be a kind of infrastructure and the history shows that infrastructure software always end
Ends up being open source because it’s more secure it’s more customizable uh it enables the creation of an ecosystem on top of it and so the the entire infrastructure of our communication systems the internet um even or cell phones uh software stack for the you know communication communicating with cell phone towers
It’s all open source for very good reasons it’s not by Design it’s really the the market forces that push it so there’s a similar phenomenon which is definitely happening now in the last uh uh few months that latu has uh has been available and more open source U llms
Have been available that people are using those open source models and and customizing them for vertical applications in businesses but also uh training them for you know particular types of uh uh languages or or cultures and so it’s a necessity we we need it we need free and diverse AI platforms for
The same reason that we need free and diverse press um so we don’t have a single opinion coming to us from from AI yeah and how do you how do you manage the expect of of stakeholders you know obviously at meta I imagine there was at least one serious conversation that
Revolved around should we make this open source or should we not and I’m
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