OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, CTO Greg Brockman, and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever recently wrote a blog post detailing OpenAI's position on the development and governance of "superintelligence." Perhaps unsurprisingly, the company widely considered the current industry leader in generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology sees the risk of not developing a superhuman AI as greater than the risk of continuing to work on it:
"Given what we're seeing now, it's conceivable that within the next decade, AI systems will surpass expert skill levels in most domains and carry out as many productive activities as one of the largest corporations today." Whether it's possible for AI systems to reach human-level performance (often referred to as "AGI," or the paradigm of artificial general intelligence), or, as OpenAI warns, whether it's possible to exceed expert-level human capabilities is still widely debated. Many experts claim that it is far from inevitable that machines will match or surpass our own cognitive abilities. It appears that OpenAI leaders Altman, Brockman, and Sutskever would rather be cautious than make mistakes. However, their cautious approach does not call for restraint.
The blog post recommends increased government oversight, involving the public in the decision-making process, and greater cooperation between developers and companies in the field. Those views reflect Altman's answers to questions from members of a Senate subcommittee at a recent congressional hearing. The blog post also notes that, according to OpenAI, "there are counterintuitive risks and difficulties in preventing superintelligence." The post ended with: "[W]e gotta get it right."
In explaining this apparent conundrum, the authors argue that stopping the supposedly inevitable creation of superintelligent intelligence will require a global surveillance mechanism. "Even so," they wrote, "is not guaranteed to be effective."
Ultimately, the authors seem to conclude that in order to develop the control and governance mechanisms necessary to protect humanity from superintelligence, OpenAI must continue to work on creating superintelligence. As the global debate on exactly how these technologies and their development should be governed and regulated continues, the cryptocurrency, blockchain, and Web3 communities remain mired in a familiar regulatory dilemma. Artificial intelligence has permeated every technology field, and fintech is no exception. With cryptocurrency trading bots built on the back of ChatGPT and the GPT API, and countless exchanges implementing AI solutions in their analytics and customer service platforms, any regulation affecting the development of consumer-facing AI products like ChatGPT Both measures could have devastating effects on both industries.
