Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, who has been emphasizing the need for artificial intelligence (AI) regulation, said, “I’m opposed to regulating small AI companies.”
Reuters reported on the 7th (local time) that CEO Altman attended a conference held in New Delhi, India and said, “I have made it clear that small and medium-sized enterprises should not be regulated.” He said it was
Recently, Altman has traveled to several countries to address the risks of AI and to call for joint efforts to mitigate them, reaching out to heads of state, as well as government and industry players.
He argues that the international community should manage it together by creating a regulatory body such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) because the pace of AI innovation is so fast that it is difficult for a single country or organization to control it.
On the 9th, he will visit Korea and hold a meeting with officials from AI startups hosted by the Ministry of Small and Medium Enterprises and Startups and Softbank Ventures.
Earlier, on the 6th, Altman said in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, “there is no plan” on whether OpenAI will be listed. He said that for the development of general purpose artificial intelligence (AGI), which is what OpenAI was founded on, “there is a possibility that investors will make decisions that will be considered very strange.”
Open AI was a non-profit research organization founded in 2015 by Tesla Chairman Elon Musk and Altman, then CEO of Y Combinator, with the aim of developing AGI that can contribute to humanity. Then, in 2019, a for-profit department was established to raise money for Research and Development.
Since then, he has received an investment of 10 billion dollars (about 13 trillion won) from Microsoft, and it is known that he decided to receive an additional 10 billion dollars as he re-signed the partnership in January this year.
However, OpenAI is in the position that it will continue to raise funds only as much as it needs for research and development and will not seriously pursue profits. To this end, it intends to maintain a ‘hybrid’ structure where the for-profit sector and the not-for-profit sector are mixed without being listed on the stock market.
The Guardian reported that Altman got a little upset when asked in an interview during a visit to the UK if OpenAI’s progress could keep up with revenue. He said he doesn’t see it that way, saying, “We are an anomaly.”
“We are trying to bring the AI revolution to the world and figure out how to make it safe and widely beneficial,” he said.
OpenAI’s non-profit nature is also revealed in its claim that it should regulate itself while raising the need to regulate AI.
Born in 1985, Sam Altman dropped out of Stanford University and co-founded Luft, a social networking mobile app company, at the age of 20. The company failed to attract users, but was bought by another company for 43.4 million dollars (earned about 56.6 billion).
He later served as CEO of Y Combinator, which discovers and supports outstanding startups, and Reddit, an SNS platform.
Reporter Jeong Byeong-il jbi@aitimes.com
