Speaking at the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Altman told attendees, “I think it would be approximately as bad of an idea to say we’re not going to have AI in our country as it was to say we’re not going to have electricity in our country, you know, back 100 plus years ago.”
For Altman, adding artificial intelligence to a nation’s infrastructure today isn’t just a “nice-to-have” competitive advantage — it’s a requirement.
As Altman explained, “I think it is non-negotiable that you have to use it [AI],” adding that “the economic growth and benefit to people that can come from this, the value to a country, is too high to ignore.”
Other tech luminaries such as Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk also pumped up the prospects of AI at the recent G20 event. As The Wall Street Journal reported, a common thread in all these presentations was a call for sensible regulation that won’t stifle AI’s benefits. Or, as Huang put it, “Don’t regulate hypothetical, theoretical harm.”
To help shape this more favorable regulatory framework, countries at G20 adopted the “Carolina Principles,” which emphasize flexibility rather than harsh enforcement. Under these points, countries should use existing regulations and only create new AI-specific rules for “novel considerations that existing legal frameworks cannot adequately address.”
The Carolina Principles also encourage lots of funding for AI research, including “flexible regulatory sandboxes and experimental exemptions” for AI labs.
Cybersecurity: AI’s stumbling block?
Although most executives painted a pretty picture for AI’s potential, a few acknowledged legitimate potential dangers. According to the WSJ, Altman and Google DeepMind’s co-founder Demis Hassabis said AI could pose a significant cybersecurity threat if leaders aren’t careful.
As CNBC reported, Altman said, “I think some things are going to go very wrong with cybersecurity unless people act quite urgently.” If countries fail to put the right safeguards in place pronto, he argued it “could set this technology back a great deal.”
Altman’s comments come a few months after OpenAI made headlines for a security crisis where its agents hacked internal systems and the AI platform Hugging Face.
