Published on:
13 Jun 2023
3
min read
On AI, and annoying questions.
So, if you were in the 1,400-strong audience at the OpenAI world tour event at the SMU Yong Pung How School of Law this afternoon, there was some guy who identified himself as "not a founder, but a practicing lawyer", before going on to ask Sam Altman and Rachel Lim about:
- whether any 'collateral damage' caused by their models was simply the price to be paid for the benefits;¹
- whether OpenAI was adopting the Uber model: get 1 million, 10 million, 100 million users, then garner support for friendly legislation;² and
- whether OpenAI would be open to re-considering whether it should have released ChatGPT the way it did.³
...yup, guilty as charged.
Look, I'm not some progress-hating Luddite. I'm excited by the potential of AI tools. It does sound kinda fun to have 100 AI employees working for me full-time to do the boring or annoying stuff. This would free up more time for more high-level professional stuff, or even more fun stuff.⁴
And I appreciate that we might not even be having this conversation about AI and AGI if ChatGPT had not been released.
But.
I wonder about the safeguards that could have, should have, or will be, put into place.
Ah well. The conversation continues.
Disclaimer:
The content of this article is intended for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.
[Altman's responses paraphrased from memory - happy to stand corrected!]
¹ Altman's response was that (a) the current harm is minimal; (b) they do not consider it from the perspective of benefits vs detriments, although they do think the benefits outweigh the detriments by orders of magnitude; and (c) it was necessary to release their models into the wild to collect more data and be stress-tested outside of the lab.
² No response to this, although I didn't expect any.
³ Altman's response was that they have been and continue to consider this. From the tenor of his response, though, he appears to maintain that releasing ChatGPT to the public was the right thing to do.
⁴ Like wakeboarding, for example. Or more time with my spouse and kids. Please don't judge me for mentioning them last.
