AI may need to be slowed down after security scare, says OpenAI CEO - NZ Herald

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has apologised to residents of Tumbler Ridge in Canada for not reporting the violent online activity of a teenager who went on to launch a mass shooting. Photo / Getty Images via AFP Developers of artificial intelligence models might need to voluntarily pump the brakes on their rapid advances to give society a chance to catch up, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said. Altman’s company, the maker of ChatGPT, recently saw two of its models carry out an autonomous cyberattack, bypassing security protocols meant to prevent such an incident. OpenAI revealed last week that during recent testing, the models broke out of their confined environment, connected to the internet and infiltrated Hugging Face, a site developers use to store and share code. Altman said: “This is the first sort of security incident that I felt very viscerally.” He said he was “a little surprised that more people” were not having similar reactions. Although it was not the first time a model slipped beyond the control of its developers, the incident was widely seen as especially concerning. OpenAI subsequently “paused” its own testing, Altman said, while it improved the security around its “sandboxing” - the process of isolating code in a controlled environment. But longer term, the industry might have to agree to a development slowdown. Altman said: “We may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels.” He said such an initiative would need to be done “in a way that does not feel like regulatory capture for anyone, and also does not feel like collusion among the frontier labs”. He added: “That’s going to take some work, and it’s important to get right.” In a podcast published on Saturday, Altman said he believed the “singularity” - a hypothetical moment when technology became so advanced that it surpassed human intelligence and control - was already here. He said: “We are now, like, in the singularity. This is the moment.” Rival AI lab Anthropic has also supported the idea of an intentional AI development slowdown. Earlier this year, the US government invoked national security concerns to block the release of powerful new models created by Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which voluntarily complied with the orders until they were reversed. - AFP Save Share Latest from World World Japan quake toll hits 28 as survivors struggle in heat 30 Jul 05:25 AM World US strikes Iran in response to ballistic missile launch 30 Jul 02:36 AM Premium World Emptying countryside leaves ‘no simple solution’ to European wildfires 30 Jul 01:43 AM Sponsored The new Waikato real estate team that hates pushy salespeople 28 Jul 12:00 AM