OpenAI CEO reveals his biggest fear to Senate panel after getting called out by another witness

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday revealed his biggest fear about artificial intelligence during testimony before a Senate panel after another witness called him out.

Altman was among three witnesses who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s privacy, technology and the law subcommittee’s hearing on AI oversight. IBM Chief Privacy & Trust Officer Christina Montgomery and NYU Professor Emeritus Gary Marcus were the others.

Altman acknowledged that AI will impact the labor market.

“We try to be very clear about that, and I think it’ll require partnership between industry and government, but mostly action by government, to figure out how we want to mitigate that,” Altman said.

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“But I’m very optimistic about how great the jobs of the future will be.”

Marcus said that today’s AI is unlikely to have an immediate effect on jobs, although he acknowledged that might not be the case in future decades when a more advanced version of AI, Artificial General Intelligence, emerges.

“When we look back at AI of today 20 years (from now) we'll be like, ‘wow, that stuff was really unreliable,’” Marcus said, noting that “It couldn't really do planning, which is an important technical aspect. Its reasoning ability and reasoning abilities were limited. But when we get to AGI Artificial General Intelligence, maybe let's say it's 50 years that really is going to have I think, profound effects on labor. And there's just no way around that.”

Marcus called out Altman, saying he didn’t believe jobs were the OpenAI CEO’s biggest fear about AI and asked him to tell the Senate panel what his biggest fear over AI was.

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“And last, I don't know if I'm allowed to do this,” Marcus said, “but I will note that Sam's worst fear I do not think is employment, and he never told us what his worst fear actually is. And I think it's germane to find out.”

Altman said he shared Marcus’ view that more advanced technologies will impact the labor market.

“I think jobs and employment and what we're all going to do with our time really matters,” Altman said.

“I agree that when we get to a very powerful systems, the landscape will change. I think I'm just more optimistic that we are incredibly creative, and we find new things to do with better tools and that wasn't happening.”

Altman said his biggest fear about AI is the potential harm the technology could cause and said such fears compelled him to develop OpenAI.

“My worst fears are that we cause significant – we the field, the technology, the industry, cause significant harm to the world. I think that could happen in a lot of different ways. It's why we started the company," Altman said.

“It's big part of why I'm here today, and why we've been here in the past, and able to spend some time with you."

Altman called for regulation of the new technology.

“I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong," he said.

"And we want to be vocal about that. We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening, but we try to be very clear eyed about what the downside cases and the work that we have to do to mitigate that.”

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