Sam Altman, the boss of ChatGPT creators OpenAI, has issued a 324-word statement after claims from the technology's 'Godfather' that artificial intelligence has a 10 percent chance of 'killing all humans in 10 years'.
Hinton's Warning
Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, known as the 'Godfather of AI', made the claims last week. "It would be foolish to say there's a one percent chance. Nobody knows how to estimate it. A 10 percent chance seems not unreasonable to me," he told BBC Newsnight.
He added: "If it's much smarter than us there are so many ways I do not think it's worth speculating." His comments came after British AI software engineer Jacob Coxon resigned from OpenAI competitor Anthropic in protest and made similar statements to Hinton.
Altman's Response
Debate around the future of the software has led Altman and Elon Musk, who has developed AI agent Grok, to agree with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that external 'auditors' should be installed at 'frontier' AI firms. However, US President Donald Trump said 'a lot of negative forces' are 'bringing up things that won't happen' when asked if he will introduce new regulations in the wake of Elon Musk's statement 'Dario is right'.
Altman has now gone one further, publicly welcoming regulation and calling on his competitors to introduce new safety checks in the meantime. He posted on X early on Monday (September 14) morning: "The world deserves confidence that American companies developing increasingly capable AI will act responsibly, especially as the trajectory of progress has steepened. Every frontier lab must deliver on this, and there is no reason any of us should come to work if we cannot.
"We welcome a federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements for frontier AI. But we do not believe we need to wait for an anti-trust exemption or legislation to begin the work of providing this confidence. Consistent rules to manage frontier risk so that we can maximize the benefits are a good idea (and we are excited by ideas like independent auditors)."
Future Development
He also said he hoped 'other companies will learn from our approaches and propose their own', but added development would not stop. He continued: "When we talk about "pacing", we do not mean "stopping". Progress has been rapid and will continue to be. But it should be slower than it otherwise could be; interventions like safety cases and monitoring have significant costs.
"Pacing will be well worth this cost; no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness, or let capabilities get ahead of alignment and monitoring."
UK Response
In the UK, top government figures said they are 'pleased [AI] companies are also talking about the threats' in response to the warnings. Describing the UK as "world leaders" in AI security, Housing Secretary Angela Rayner added: "We have put robust systems in place here in the UK, like the AI Security Institute, to make sure we're building resilience so that we get the benefit as well as really understand and protect against any risk."
