Artificial intelligence clearly is modeled after humans in that it has revealed itself to be imperfect. In the past week, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has mesmerized the public even as The New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose famously labeled it “unhinged.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is using the moment to clarify the company’s priorities, posting on Friday an apologia-cum-mission statement. If the company is successful at mass deployment of artificial general intelligence (AGI), it “could help us elevate humanity by increasing abundance, turbocharging the global economy, and aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge,” Altman wrote.

On the other hand, AGI also comes “with serious risk of misuse, drastic accidents, and societal disruption.” But the genie is out of the bottle and “the potential upside is so great, we do not believe it is possible or desirable for society to stop [AGI’s] development.” The only option is for “society and the developers of AGI” to come to terms with “how to get it right.”

Although it’s impossible to predict exactly how this experiment will play out, Altman articulated three principles:

1. “We want AGI to empower humanity to maximally flourish,” adding that while the folks at OpenAI “don’t expect the future to be an unqualified utopia,” they “want to maximize the good and minimize the bad.”
2. Access to, and governance of AGI must be “widely and fairly shared.”
3. Appropriate navigation of “massive risks.” “What seems right in theory often plays out more strangely than expected in practice,” Altman said, writing that “deploying less powerful versions of the technology” can minimize problematic “‘one shot to get it right’ scenarios.”

Not unlike ChatGPT itself, Altman’s blog post sparked controversy. “Some found the manifesto-of-sorts, which has a million ‘likes’ on Twitter alone, ‘fascinating.’ One tweet called it a ‘must-read for anyone who expects to live 20 more years,’” writes VentureBeat.

Others were less kind. “Emily Bender, professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, said: ‘From the get-go this is just gross. They think they are really in the business of developing/shaping ‘AGI.’ And they think they are positioned to decide what ‘benefits all of humanity,’” VentureBeat reports, adding that NYU professor emeritus Gary Marcus, founder and CEO of Robust AI, tweeted that he is “smelling delusions of grandeur at OpenAI.”

The Wall Street Journal rather poetically characterized AI as “an alien intelligence that no one really understands,” one with “the ability to influence our assessment of what’s true in the world.” The effects are already being felt on a global scale, with “more than a million people in 169 countries” granted access by Microsoft to a beta trial of its Bing search engine that leverages OpenAI technology since its release this month.

Related:
Why Do AI Chatbots Tell Lies and Act Weird? Look in the Mirror, The New York Times, 2/26/23
Some Companies Are Already Replacing Workers with ChatGPT, Fortune, 2/25/23
Timnit Gebru Is Calling Attention to the Pitfalls of AI, The Wall Street Journal, 2/24/23
The Real Agenda Behind All the Chatbots, Slate, 2/24/23
Generative AI’s Money Game, Axios, 2/27/23
For Tech Giants, AI Like Bing and Bard Poses Billion-Dollar Search Problem, Reuters, 2/22/23