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sam altman
'Awful News for Humanity': Alarm as Larry Summers Joins OpenAI Board
“There is no greater indication that OpenAI is unserious about the interests of humanity than their elevation of Larry Summers to its board of directors," said one watchdog.
Nov 22, 2023
News that OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman will be returning to the artificial intelligence startup just days after he was ousted by the firm's board of directors was accompanied by the announcement Tuesday of a new initial board consisting of three individuals—one of whom is the Wall Street-friendly economist and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.
Given Summers' record of fighting tougher regulations for risky financial instruments and—more recently—his incorrect predictions about the trajectory and stubbornness of inflation in the U.S., his elevation to the board of a company whose AI work has profound implications for the future of humanity drew immediate alarm.
The Revolving Door Project, a progressive watchdog group whose research has uncovered Summers' deep corporate ties, called his selection to the OpenAI board "awful news for humanity."
"There is no greater indication that OpenAI is unserious about the interests of humanity than their elevation of Larry Summers to its board of directors," said Jeff Hauser, the group's executive director. "Summers energetically promotes cryptocurrency, inflation hysteria, and himself with equally misplaced ardor."
Economist and journalist Nomi Prins wrote on social media that Summers "holds the top spot of those responsible for the 2008 financial crisis," alluding to his opposition to more strictly regulating financial derivatives that fueled the economic collapse.
"If AI is to be focused on human policy and care, he's a dustbin for deregulation and recklessness," Prins argued. "As president of Harvard in 2005, Summers launched a disgusting tirade on women in math and science and seemed to believe it was based on 'research in behavioral genetics.' You want Larry to be involved with steering AI forward with human consideration?"
"Summers' ascent to the heights of AI should accelerate concerns that AI will be bad for all but the richest and most opportunistic amongst us."
OpenAI's decision to reinstate Altman as CEO under a new board consisting of Summers, former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, and Quora chief executive Adam D'Angelo came less than a week after the previous board removed Altman, sparking an immediate employee revolt.
The chaotic leadership shuffle at the $90 billion company was the culmination of infighting that had been building for more than a year, with some of the tensions surrounding Altman's pursuit of commercial expansion at the potential expense of safety, according toThe New York Times.
"The tension got worse as OpenAI became a mainstream name thanks to its popular ChatGPT chatbot," the Times reported Tuesday. "At one point, Mr. Altman... made a move to push out one of the board's members because he thought a research paper she had co-written was critical of the company. Another member, Ilya Sutskever, thought Mr. Altman was not always being honest when talking with the board. And some board members worried that Mr. Altman was too focused on expansion while they wanted to balance that growth with AI safety."
Wirednoted last week that "disagreements over the issue of prioritizing safe development of AI previously led several prominent OpenAI researchers to leave the company and found competitor Anthropic."
Earlier this year, Altman joined a number of industry leaders in signing a letter declaring that "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." But researchers have warned that the guardrails put in place at OpenAI are badly inadequate, particularly given the current regulatory vacuum in the U.S.
Last month, U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order aimed at bolstering AI safety standards, a move that watchdogs welcomed as a positive first step that must be followed by more ambitious action.
It's unclear precisely what influence Summers will have on the direction of OpenAI or artificial intelligence development more broadly.
As Bloomberg observed Wednesday, "The few comments he has made about AI have centered on the labor impact."
"In 2018, Summers disputed the claims from then-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin that AI would not replace American jobs for 50 to 100 years," Bloomberg noted. "The robots are coming,' Summers wrote in The Washington Post. That year, he also warned of economic catastrophe if the U.S. 'loses its lead' in biotech and AI to China."
Last year, Summers told Bloomberg TV that "we are living in truly historic times" and said the AI revolution carries "opportunities and threats," adding that there's "no assurance at all" that advances in artificial intelligence will usher in progressive outcomes.
Critics suggested that with Summers involved in the management of OpenAI, the chances of guardrails operating in the public interest, as opposed to corporate profits and dominance, are worse.
"Summers' ascent to the heights of AI should accelerate concerns that AI will be bad for all but the richest and most opportunistic amongst us," said Hauser.
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Experts Urge Action to Mitigate 'Risk of Extinction From AI'
It "should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war," says a new statement signed by dozens of artificial intelligence critics and boosters.
May 30, 2023
On Tuesday, 80 artificial intelligence scientists and more than 200 "other notable figures" signed a statement that says "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."
The one-sentence warning from the diverse group of scientists, engineers, corporate executives, academics, and other concerned individuals doesn't go into detail about the existential threats posed by AI. Instead, it seeks to "open up discussion" and "create common knowledge of the growing number of experts and public figures who also take some of advanced AI’s most severe risks seriously," according to the Center for AI Safety, a U.S.-based nonprofit whose website hosts the statement.
Lead signatory Geoffrey Hinton, often called "the godfather of AI," has been sounding the alarm for weeks. Earlier this month, the 75-year-old professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Toronto announced that he had resigned from his job at Google in order to speak more freely about the dangers associated with AI.
Before he quit Google, Hinton told CBS News in March that the rapidly advancing technology's potential impacts are comparable to "the Industrial Revolution, or electricity, or maybe the wheel."
Asked about the chances of the technology "wiping out humanity," Hinton warned that "it's not inconceivable."
That frightening potential doesn't necessarily lie with currently existing AI tools such as ChatGPT, but rather with what is called "artificial general intelligence" (AGI), which would encompass computers developing and acting on their own ideas.
"Until quite recently, I thought it was going to be like 20 to 50 years before we have general-purpose AI," Hinton told CBS News. "Now I think it may be 20 years or less."
Pressed by the outlet if it could happen sooner, Hinton conceded that he wouldn't rule out the possibility of AGI arriving within five years, a significant change from a few years ago when he "would have said, 'No way.'"
"We have to think hard about how to control that," said Hinton. Asked if that's possible, Hinton said, "We don't know, we haven't been there yet, but we can try."
The AI pioneer is far from alone. According to the 2023 AI Index Report, an annual assessment of the fast-growing industry published last month by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, 57% of computer scientists surveyed said that "recent progress is moving us toward AGI," and 58% agreed that "AGI is an important concern."
Although its findings were released in mid-April, Stanford's survey of 327 experts in natural language processing—a branch of computer science essential to the development of chatbots—was conducted last May and June, months before OpenAI's ChatGPT burst onto the scene in November.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who signed the statement shared Tuesday by the Center for AI Safety, wrote in a February blog post: "The risks could be extraordinary. A misaligned superintelligent AGI could cause grievous harm to the world."
The following month, however, Altman declined to sign an open letter calling for a half-year moratorium on training AI systems beyond the level of OpenAI's latest chatbot, GPT-4.
The letter, published in March, states that "powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable."
Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk was among those who called for a pause two months ago, but he is "developing plans to launch a new artificial intelligence start-up to compete with" OpenAI, according toThe Financial Times, begging the question of whether his stated concern about the technology's "profound risks to society and humanity" is sincere or an expression of self-interest.
That Altman and several other AI boosters signed Tuesday's statement raises the possibility that insiders with billions of dollars at stake are attempting to showcase their awareness of the risks posed by their products in a bid to persuade officials of their capacity for self-regulation.
Demands from outside the industry for robust government regulation of AI are growing. While ever-more dangerous forms of AGI may still be years away, there is already mounting evidence that existing AI tools are exacerbating the spread of disinformation, from chatbots spouting lies and face-swapping apps generating fake videos to cloned voices committing fraud. Current, untested AI is hurting people in other ways, including when automated technologies deployed by Medicare Advantage insurers unilaterally decide to end payments, resulting in the premature termination of coverage for vulnerable seniors.
Critics have warned that in the absence of swift interventions from policymakers, unregulated AI could harm additional healthcare patients, undermine fact-based journalism, hasten the destruction of democracy, and lead to an unintended nuclear war. Other common worries include widespread worker layoffs and worsening inequality as well as a massive uptick in carbon pollution.
A report published last month by Public Citizen argues that "until meaningful government safeguards are in place to protect the public from the harms of generative AI, we need a pause."
"Businesses are deploying potentially dangerous AI tools faster than their harms can be understood or mitigated," the progressive advocacy group warned in a statement.
"History offers no reason to believe that corporations can self-regulate away the known risks—especially since many of these risks are as much a part of generative AI as they are of corporate greed," the watchdog continued. "Businesses rushing to introduce these new technologies are gambling with peoples' lives and livelihoods, and arguably with the very foundations of a free society and livable world."
Earlier this month, Public Citizen president Robert Weissman welcomed the Biden administration's new plan to "promote responsible American innovation in artificial intelligence and protect people's rights and safety," but he also stressed the need for "more aggressive measures" to "address the threats of runaway corporate AI."
Echoing Public Citizen, an international group of doctors warned three weeks ago in the peer-reviewed journal BMJ Open Health that AI "could pose an existential threat to humanity" and demanded a moratorium on the development of such technology pending strong government oversight.
AI "poses a number of threats to human health and well-being," the physicians and related experts wrote. "With exponential growth in AI research and development, the window of opportunity to avoid serious and potentially existential harms is closing."
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