Sam Altman warns AI could kill us all. But he still wants the world to use it

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks before a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law hearing on artificial intelligence, on May 16, on Capitol Hill in Washington.

Sam Altman thinks the technology underpinning his company’s most famous product could bring about the end of human civilization.

In May, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman filed into a Senate subcommittee hearing room in Washington, DC, with an urgent plea to lawmakers: Create thoughtful regulations that embrace the powerful promise of artificial intelligence – while mitigating the risk that it overpowers humanity. It was a defining moment for him and for the future of AI.

With the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT late last year, Altman, 38, emerged overnight as the poster child for a new crop of AI tools that can generate images and texts in response to user prompts, a technology called generative AI. Not long after its release, ChatGPT became a household name almost synonymous with AI itself. CEOs used it to draft emails, people built websites with no prior coding experience, and it passed exams from law and business schools. It has the potential to revolutionize nearly every industry, including education, finance, agriculture and healthcare, from surgeries to medicine vaccine development.

(Source: CNN)