OpenAI boss Sam Altman lifts the lid on ChatGPT’s potential – and the risks

The most in-demand man in the world right now is a millennial at the forefront of artificial intelligence. And his name is Sam Altman.

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman in Melbourne: ‘We know AI could destroy the whole world.’

Meet the kingpin of AI.

Standing about 170cm tall, dressed in a long sleeve t-shirt with buttons and a pair of black skinny jeans that end just above his shoes, Sam Altman fronted an audience of around 2000 on Friday at the Melbourne Convention Centre.

With his bare ankles and rainbow-coloured sneakers, this is the man world leaders have been lining up to meet over the past four weeks as OpenAI’s main man went on a 22-country, 28-city tour across six continents.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has enjoyed one of the fastest take-ups of any new technology since it was released to the public in November last year.

Many are anxious about AI and want to know whether the company, with a circular logo somewhere between a flower and hair scrunchie, is really going to take over the world – and their jobs.

Mr Altman is no different.

“We started this company because we know AI could destroy the whole world and we wanted to figure out how we could prevent that,” he told a crowd at a fireside chat hosted by The Startup Network.

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Dr Nora Koslowski, Melbourne Business School’s chief learning innovation officer.

The man at the helm of ChatGPT doesn’t think AI is going to take away everybody’s jobs.

“I suspect that it’s just not quite going to go like the whole naive ‘AI takes away my job’. These models are very good at tasks but they’re not going to hold jobs,” he said.

But Mr Altman does believe we’re on the cusp of major changes and that some roles are about to disappear forever.

“I think human demand seems pretty limitless. The expectations on all of us will go up but our ability to do things will go up and we will morph our jobs into who knows what. Some jobs will totally go away and there will of course be some totally new ones, too,” he said.

“But it’s very hard for me to imagine a world without human doctors, even if the day to day of being a doctor becomes quite a different experience.”

he ChatGPT boss was unfazed by most questions, occasionally cracking a slight smile.

But one question did elicit some emotion.

When asked about the relatively small size of OpenAI and how small teams could scale with minimal resources, he said: “I’m going to flip the question and say how do these companies with very large teams accomplish anything at all? I think it’s easier to succeed with a small, focused and super-talented team,” he said.

Mr Altman was also criticised by one brazen attendee, who told the OpenAI chief that his idea of having ChatGPT’s values align with the country it was being accessed from was “a little bit disturbing”.

“Do you think those people should have to live with your values?” Mr Altman asked her.

“Yes.”

“I don’t,” he said.

“I think we do have to agree on what the global balance of this system is going to be. There are basic human rights the system has come up with.

“I think there’s a lot of nuance between white collar references and human rights. We can all agree that digital assistants are going to respect basic human rights.”

Mr Altman said he hoped human and AI collaboration could help the world solve problems in human-to-human collaboration.

The crowd at the fireside chat with Sam Altman.

Mr Altman made a brief appearance at VIP drinks hosted outside the fireside arena, stopping for selfies and a handful of meet and greets.

Asked whether Australians were confronting, based on some of the crowd’s questions, he responded: “No, I know some people can think Australians come across that way, but I don’t think so. My partner is actually from here …”

Mr Altman arrived in Melbourne after a pit stop in Canberra to chat with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Industry and Science Minister Ed Husic. The tour bypassed the nation’s largest city.

The stop may have been strategic as Mr Altman is no stranger to Melbourne, the hometown of his partner, Oliver Mulherin, a Meta software engineer based in America’s Bay Area.

Mr Mulherin graduated from the University of Melbourne with a computer science degree in 2016, and high school a few years earlier in 2013.

Mr Altman, 38, co-founded location-sharing service Loopt in 2005. He was very briefly the chief executive of online social media forum Reddit for eight days in 2014 and president of global start-up accelerator Y Combinator between 2011 to 2019.

He joined OpenAI, which was founded in 2015, in 2020, and has clocked over three and a half years this month.

Asked whether he’d consider teaming up with Elon Musk to combat the existential threat AI posed to humanity, Mr Altman said “yes”.

Joseph Lam was a guest of The Startup Network in Melbourne.

Originally published as OpenAI boss Sam Altman lifts the lid on ChatGPT’s potential – and the risks