Chapel Hill, North Carolina — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned governments against excluding artificial intelligence from their countries, arguing that doing so would be comparable to rejecting electricity more than a century ago.
“I think it would be approximately as bad of an idea to say we’re not gonna have AI in our country as it was to say we’re not gonna have electricity in our country, you know, back 100 plus years ago,” Altman said during a fireside chat with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
Speaking to representatives of G20 economies, Altman said governments may choose different regulatory approaches and decide whether to build or lease data centers, but adopting AI itself is becoming unavoidable.
“For sure, I think it is not negotiable. You have to use it,” he said. “The economic growth and benefit to people that can come from this, the value to a country is too high to ignore.”
Altman predicted that AI will fuel a major expansion in entrepreneurship and small businesses by giving more people access to expertise, software and other resources that were previously expensive or difficult to obtain.
“I think this, for example, will be the greatest boom in entrepreneurship and the creation and development of small businesses the world’s ever seen,” he said.
He recalled meeting a laundromat operator who used ChatGPT for marketing, reviewing legal contracts and managing vendor relationships. Altman said the encounter showed how AI could help small business owners perform tasks that once required outside specialists.
He also said the pace of startup development has accelerated sharply.
“The work that we expected a startup to accomplish in three months is now probably doable in, like, 17 minutes with Codex,” Altman said. “The world is not caught up with what this is going to mean.”
Altman said future AI systems could become persistent virtual collaborators capable of working continuously alongside people. He also predicted that AI could broaden access to healthcare, education and other services that historically have been easier for wealthier people to obtain.
“My prediction is we won’t be talking about AI as much as we do in a decade from now, because we’ll just expect it everywhere,” he said.
At the same time, Altman warned that rapid AI adoption carries significant risks, particularly in cybersecurity, biosecurity and the concentration of power.
“I think some things are gonna go very wrong with cybersecurity unless people act quite urgently,” he said.
“Another thing that could go wrong is too much concentration of power,” Altman added. “In many ways, AI should be an equalising force in the world.”
He said making AI broadly accessible will require substantial investment in computing infrastructure even as chips and algorithms become more efficient. Without enough capacity, he warned, advanced AI could remain costly and disproportionately available to wealthier users.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 and began operating in 2016. Its ChatGPT service, launched publicly in November 2022, helped bring generative AI into mainstream use by allowing users to generate text, analyze information and write computer code through conversational prompts. (Source: IANS)
