AI could make society more equal and productive, argues ChatGPT CEO

Altman, who earlier in the day met the UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, spoke to nearly 1,000 people during a recent visit to UCL.

He discussed a range of topics, from the more personal (how he writes a to-do list by hand) to the societal – the risks and promise of AI. He argued for caution in regulation while the technology was still emerging. 

“The right answer is probably something between the traditional European-UK approach and the traditional US approach,” he said.

But he said he believed the benefits of super-intelligence greatly outweighed the risks, leading to accelerated economic growth, more jobs, and potentially greater equality.

“My basic model of the world is that the cost of intelligence and the cost of energy are the two limited inputs,” he said. “If you can make those dramatically cheaper, dramatically more accessible, that does more to help poor people than rich people […] This technology will lift all of the world up.”

On the risks of the technology, Altman said ensuring broad access to super-intelligent systems was a “very challenging question”, and also that these systems could be used to create “interactive, personalised, persuasive” disinformation. 
On the latter, he said regulation could help, but that “the real solution is to educate people about what’s happening”, so that people understood the dangers in the same way that people now understand that an image might be digitally manipulated.

During this panel session, Altman was asked by an audience member about using super-intelligence to help humans visit Mars. He replied: “I have no desire to go and live on Mars – it sounds horrible… If we can send robots first and we can spruce it up a little bit that seems much better. But I think Earth is really quite wonderful.”

Altman’s meeting with the UK Prime Minister earlier in the day occurred alongside UCL alumnus and supporter Demis Hassabis, Co-Founder of DeepMind (now Google DeepMind), as well as Dario Amodei of the company Anthropic.