The mystery continues... ๐
Sam Altman a few minutes ago:
The world needs assurance that American companies developing increasingly capable AI will act responsibly, especially as the path of progress becomes steeper. Every frontier lab must uphold this, and there's no reason for any of us to come to work if we cannot.
We welcome a federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements for frontier AI. But we don't believe we need to wait for antitrust exemptions or legislation to begin the work of providing this assurance. Consistent rules for managing frontier risks so we can maximize the benefits are a good idea (and we're excited about ideas like independent auditors).
Years ago, companies like ours developed things like responsible scaling policies and preparedness frameworks. These were good for that moment, and focused primarily on the deployment of completed models, not what happens during their development process.
Today's shift to focusing on safe development and execution will require new tools. For example, at OpenAI we are now drafting explicit pre-mortems for frontier reinforcement learning runs that we expect to significantly increase capability, in addition to the safety work we've long done pre-model release.
We hope other companies will learn from our approaches and offer their own; we think common standards for misalignment, monitoring, and safety will lead to better outcomes. We look forward to collaborating with our peers across the industry to draft the best version of these.
When we talk about 'pace,' we don't mean 'stop.' Progress has been fast and will continue to be. But it needs to be slower than it otherwise could be; interventions like pre-mortems and monitoring incur significant costs.
Pace will be well worth this cost; no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness, or allow capabilities to move forward ahead of alignment and monitoring.
Where we will need our government's help is with international coordination. But first we need to do what we can ourselves.
There are two ways AI progress could end very badly, and we must avoid them.
First, we could lose control of the future to AI. This is unacceptable; we are unapologetically on team humanity, and AI must always serve people. To ensure this, we need ways to ensure alignment and safety techniques stay one step ahead of progress in model capabilities.
Second, we could arrive at a world with too much concentration of power. If extraordinarily powerful AI is used by one person or one company to impose their worldview on everyone else, the results could be extremely dystopian.
Avoiding these two threats requires walking a narrow path in the middle; for example, one country could accumulate too much power โ another example is one lab ending up with too much power. An attempt to calm things down?
Or perhaps the exact opposite?
Even we are completely confused now... ๐
Meanwhile, the market reacts โ as always โ with a sell-off first,
Then it will look for explanations ๐