‘AI would be good at tasks but not…’ OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on AI’s impact on jobs at Senate hearing

Altman during the hearing said that one of his greatest fears is the disruption to the labor market, and called on Congress to help address the impact. 

In the hearing, he said, “I expect there to be significant impact on jobs, but exactly what it looks like is very difficult to predict.”

“As our quality of life raises and as machines and tools that we create can help us live better lives, the bar raises for what we do,” Altman said. “I’m very optimistic about how great the jobs of the future will be.”

He added, “I think its important to undertand that GPT-4 is a tool, not a creature which is easy to get confused. And it’s a tool that people have a great deal of control over in how they use it.”

“And second, GPT-4 and other system like it are good at going tasks not jobs. And so you see already that people using GPT-4 to do their job much more efficiently, by helping them with tasks.”

“Now, GPT-4 will, I think, entirely automate some jobs. And it will create new ones that we believe will be much better.”

Earlier in March, Altman in an interview had said that he is ‘a little bit scared’ of the potential of the AI chatbot. In an interview with ABC News, he said that ChatGPT can ‘eliminate’ many human jobs. “We’ve got to be careful here,” said Altman. “I think people should be happy that we are a little bit scared of this,” he admitted.

Coming back to the hearing, Senator Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law mentioned about displaced workers as “perhaps the biggest nightmare” of AI advancements, and stressed the importance of training workers to learn new skills as part of what he called a “looming new industrial revolution.”

Blumenthal also opened the hearing with an audio clip that sounded like his voice, but was actually written and composed by AI products. Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar joked with Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn about whose state had the best musicians according to ChatGPT.

The Senate’s first major hearing on artificial intelligence covered everything from the lighthearted marvels of generative AI to dire warnings about existential threats to society and democracy.

Altman told Congress that government intervention will be critical to mitigating the risks of increasingly powerful AI systems. “As this technology advances, we understand that people are anxious about how it could change the way we live. We are too,” OpenAI CEO said.

He proposed the formation of a US or global agency that would license the most powerful AI systems and have the authority to “take that license away and ensure compliance with safety standards.”

His San Francisco-based startup rocketed to public attention after it released ChatGPT late last year. The free chatbot tool answers questions with convincingly human-like responses.

What started out as a panic among educators about ChatGPT’s use to cheat on homework assignments has expanded to broader concerns about the ability of the latest crop of “generative AI” tools to mislead people, spread falsehoods, violate copyright protections and upend some jobs.

And while there’s no immediate sign Congress will craft sweeping new AI rules, as European lawmakers are doing, the societal concerns brought Altman and other tech CEOs to the White House earlier this month and have led US agencies to promise to crack down on harmful AI products that break existing civil rights and consumer protection laws.

Pressed on his own worst fear about AI, Altman mostly avoided specifics, except to say that the industry could cause “significant harm to the world” and that “if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.”

But he later proposed that a new regulatory agency should impose safeguards that would block AI models that could “self-replicate and self-exfiltrate into the wild” — hinting at futuristic concerns about advanced AI systems that could manipulate humans into ceding control.

That focus on a far-off “science fiction trope” of super-powerful AI could make it harder to take action against already existing harms that require regulators to dig deep on data transparency, discriminatory behavior and potential for trickery and disinformation, said a former Biden administration official who co-authored its plan for an AI bill of rights.

“It’s the fear of these (super-powerful) systems and our lack of understanding of them that is making everyone have a collective freak-out,” said Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a Brown University computer scientist who was assistant director for science and justice at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “This fear, which is very unfounded, is a distraction from all the concerns we’re dealing with right now.”

(With inputs from agencies)

Altman during the hearing said that one of his greatest fears is the disruption to the labor market, and called on Congress to help address the impact. 

In the hearing, he said, “I expect there to be significant impact on jobs, but exactly what it looks like is very difficult to predict.”

“As our quality of life raises and as machines and tools that we create can help us live better lives, the bar raises for what we do,” Altman said. “I’m very optimistic about how great the jobs of the future will be.”

He added, “I think its important to undertand that GPT-4 is a tool, not a creature which is easy to get confused. And it’s a tool that people have a great deal of control over in how they use it.”

“And second, GPT-4 and other system like it are good at going tasks not jobs. And so you see already that people using GPT-4 to do their job much more efficiently, by helping them with tasks.”

“Now, GPT-4 will, I think, entirely automate some jobs. And it will create new ones that we believe will be much better.”

Earlier in March, Altman in an interview had said that he is ‘a little bit scared’ of the potential of the AI chatbot. In an interview with ABC News, he said that ChatGPT can ‘eliminate’ many human jobs. “We’ve got to be careful here,” said Altman. “I think people should be happy that we are a little bit scared of this,” he admitted.

Coming back to the hearing, Senator Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law mentioned about displaced workers as “perhaps the biggest nightmare” of AI advancements, and stressed the importance of training workers to learn new skills as part of what he called a “looming new industrial revolution.”

Blumenthal also opened the hearing with an audio clip that sounded like his voice, but was actually written and composed by AI products. Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar joked with Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn about whose state had the best musicians according to ChatGPT.

The Senate’s first major hearing on artificial intelligence covered everything from the lighthearted marvels of generative AI to dire warnings about existential threats to society and democracy.

Altman told Congress that government intervention will be critical to mitigating the risks of increasingly powerful AI systems. “As this technology advances, we understand that people are anxious about how it could change the way we live. We are too,” OpenAI CEO said.

He proposed the formation of a US or global agency that would license the most powerful AI systems and have the authority to “take that license away and ensure compliance with safety standards.”

His San Francisco-based startup rocketed to public attention after it released ChatGPT late last year. The free chatbot tool answers questions with convincingly human-like responses.

What started out as a panic among educators about ChatGPT’s use to cheat on homework assignments has expanded to broader concerns about the ability of the latest crop of “generative AI” tools to mislead people, spread falsehoods, violate copyright protections and upend some jobs.

And while there’s no immediate sign Congress will craft sweeping new AI rules, as European lawmakers are doing, the societal concerns brought Altman and other tech CEOs to the White House earlier this month and have led US agencies to promise to crack down on harmful AI products that break existing civil rights and consumer protection laws.

Pressed on his own worst fear about AI, Altman mostly avoided specifics, except to say that the industry could cause “significant harm to the world” and that “if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.”

But he later proposed that a new regulatory agency should impose safeguards that would block AI models that could “self-replicate and self-exfiltrate into the wild” — hinting at futuristic concerns about advanced AI systems that could manipulate humans into ceding control.

That focus on a far-off “science fiction trope” of super-powerful AI could make it harder to take action against already existing harms that require regulators to dig deep on data transparency, discriminatory behavior and potential for trickery and disinformation, said a former Biden administration official who co-authored its plan for an AI bill of rights.

“It’s the fear of these (super-powerful) systems and our lack of understanding of them that is making everyone have a collective freak-out,” said Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a Brown University computer scientist who was assistant director for science and justice at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “This fear, which is very unfounded, is a distraction from all the concerns we’re dealing with right now.”

(With inputs from agencies)