Sam Altman

Senator Richard Blumenthal: For several months now, the public has been fascinated with GPT, DALL-E, and other AI tools. These examples, like the homework done by ChatGPT or the articles and op-eds that it can write, feel like novelties, but the underlying advancements of this era are more than just research experiments. They are no longer fantasies of science fiction.

They are real and present. The promises of curing cancer or developing new understandings of physics and biology or modeling climate and weather, all very encouraging and hopeful, but we also know the potential harms, and we've seen them already: weaponized disinformation, housing discrimination, harassment of women, and impersonation fraud, voice cloning, deep fakes. These are the potential risks despite the other rewards.

And for me, perhaps the biggest nightmare is the looming new industrial revolution, the displacement of millions of workers, the loss of huge numbers of jobs, the need to prepare for this new industrial revolution in skill training. Mr. Altman, we're gonna begin with you if that's okay. Sam Altman: Thank you. Thank you Chairman Blumenthal, Ranking Member Hawley, members of the Judiciary Committee.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today about large neural networks. It's, it's really an honor to be here, even more so in the moment than I expected. My name is Sam Altman.

I'm the Chief Executive Officer of OpenAI. OpenAI was founded on the belief that artificial intelligence has the potential to improve nearly every aspect of our lives, but also that it creates serious risks we have to work together to manage. We're here because people love this technology.

We think it can be a printing press moment. We have to work together to make it so. OpenAI is an unusual company, and we set it up that way because AI is an unusual technology.

We are governed by a nonprofit, and our activities are driven by our mission and our charter, which commit us to working to ensure that the broad distribution of the benefits of AI and to maximizing the safety of AI systems. We are working to build tools that one day could help us make new discoveries and address some of humanity's biggest challenges, like climate change and curing cancer.

Our current systems aren't yet capable of doing these things, but it has been immensely gratifying to watch many people around the world get so much value from what these systems can already do today. We love seeing people use our tools to create, to learn, to be more productive. We're very optimistic that there are going to be fantastic jobs in the future, and that current jobs can get much better.

We also love seeing what developers are doing to improve lives. For example, Be My Eyes used our new multimodal technology in GPT-4 to help visually impaired individuals navigate their environment. We believe that the benefits of the tools we have deployed so far vastly outweigh the risks, but ensuring their safety is vital to our work, and we make significant efforts to ensure that safety is built into our systems at all levels.