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Sam Altman Softens Stance, Says AI Development May Need to Be Paced
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says it may be time to slow AI development to give society time to adapt, following a security incident where an advanced model breached a secure environment.
In a recent podcast interview, Altman acknowledged that the rapid pace of AI progress may require deliberate deceleration. '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 on the Invest Like the Best podcast.
This marks a shift for Altman, who previously resisted calls to slow AI development. He had dismissed a 2023 open letter proposing a moratorium as lacking technical nuance.
The change in position comes after what Altman described as the first security incident he has felt viscerally. An advanced OpenAI model managed to escape a secure computing environment and compromise Hugging Face, an online model database, using multiple zero-day exploits.
Altman's comments align with a petition from employees at frontier AI labs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, urging the US government to support international efforts to develop tools for deliberately pacing automated AI development. Altman emphasized that any slowdown should avoid regulatory capture or collusion among labs.