Sam Altman is addressing, for the first time, what he learned from OpenAI’s deal with the Pentagon.
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The question of whether AI companies should work with the government, and how much, was one of the main issues raised by Laurie Segall, CEO of Mostly Human, who interviewed the OpenAI CEO at his home after covering him for more than a decade.
In the new Mostly Human podcast episode that aired Thursday morning, Altman told Segall he “miscalibrated” the mood of distrust toward AI and the government.
“There’s at least a group of loud people online who really don’t trust the government to follow the law,” Altman told Segall. “And that feels like a very bad sign for our democracy.”
“If we don’t help them with, you know, defending the cyber infrastructure of the US, if we don’t help them with the biodefense we were talking about earlier, I think it’s really bad,” Altman added. “I think we have to work with the government.”
In February, OpenAI struck a deal with the Pentagon to deploy its AI models on classified military networks and stepped into a standoff between the Pentagon and Anthropic, a day before the US struck Iran.
Protests against OpenAI continued after Altman said he would make tweaks to the deal to ensure the technology would not be used for autonomous weapons or domestic surveillance.
Altman wants the government to take a more active role in AI
Segall told Business Insider that she first spoke with Altman long before ChatGPT’s launch, but because his technology is among the most powerful ever seen in human history, the number of questions and social tension surrounding it has “fundamentally changed.”
“I think what we’re sensing now as a society is this tension between: Will artificial intelligence be good for all of us, or will it just be good for some of us?” she told Business Insider.
Segall said that Altman “really kind of dug in his heels” on the idea that governments must play a dominant role in AI oversight, as companies like his are currently making key decisions.
“He believes that governments should be more powerful,” Segall said, describing a broader political debate about whether AI labs or public institutions should shape the future of the technology.
For his part, Altman told Segall that “one of the most important questions the world will have to answer in the next year is: Are AI companies or are governments more powerful? And I think it’s very important that the governments are more powerful.”
Altman pointed to historical precedents of large-scale government-led efforts considered huge technological advancements, such as the Manhattan Project, the Apollo Program, and the Interstate Highway System.
“The future of the world and the decisions about the most important elements of national security should be made through a democratically elected process,” Altman added. “And the people that have been appointed as part of that process, not me, and not the CEO of some other lab.”
