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Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, used a high-profile trip to South Korea on Friday to call for coordinated international regulation of generative artificial intelligence, the technology that underpins his famous chatbot.
“As these systems get very, very powerful, that does require special concern, and it has global impact. So it also requires global cooperation,” Altman said at an event in Seoul, ahead of a meeting with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.
He is one of hundreds of top experts who recently warned about the risk of human extinction from AI, saying mitigating that possibility “should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
Altman explained Friday that his concern was “not our inability to adapt, it is the speed [at which] this might all happen.”
“If you study the history of technological revolutions, seems like roughly in two generations, we can adapt to almost any amount of labor market change. But if this all happens in 10 years, that’s a new challenge,” he said.
Governments are under pressure to regulate AI.
In a Friday statement, President Yoon stressed the importance of international standards to prevent unwanted “side effects” related to platforms such as ChatGPT, saying there was a need to act “with a sense of speed.”
Last month, top US and European officials met in Sweden to discuss oversight of AI, where they pledged to help establish voluntary codes of conduct, according to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken as quoted by Reuters.
In China, authorities will also “be initiating AI regulation,” according to Elon Musk, who helped found OpenAI before breaking from the group. Musk cited meetings with senior government officials during his trip to China last week, Reuters reported.
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