Sam Altman predicts AI race could end with ‘terrible’ scenario where one company holds all power, cuts off resources

Among them are the heads of the most influential AI firms in the large language model space, Dario Amodei of Anthropic (maker of Claude) and Sam Altman of OpenAI (ChatGPT), the latter of whom has just suggested a particularly nightmarish scenario could be a very realistic possibility if leaders aren’t careful.

Three ‘endgames’ — and one of them is ‘terrible’

In a recent memo to his staff, Altman broke down what he sees as three likely outcomes of society’s attempts to keep AI under control.

The first two are palatable: the creation of an independent global authority to oversee the sector and its players, tasked with implementing policy and holding all parties to account, or a collaborative global AI lab of sorts through which all research, development and product flows.

Then there is the more unsavory likelihood, where one company creates such powerful AI that it’s able to use it to cut down competitors and hoard all command of the technology — and by extension, much of the economy, including the resources required for AI’s creation.

“I think that one’s terrible,” Altman allegedly said, speculating that any entity that ends up with such power would probably “melt everyone else’s GPUs” as a first step. And the closer we get to truly recursive self-improving algorithms, this prospect becomes increasingly realistic.

This potentiality has been deemed the “Eliezer Plan,” a nod to AI researcher and safety advocate Eliezer Yudkowsky, who used “burning all GPUs” as one example of how AI could be used for potentially lethal destruction — and what the strong, good actors in the space must become capable of to prevent more nefarious actors from doing so.

Yudkowsky, one of the first and most well-known to raise alarms that AI could kill us all, called for a shutdown of the AI frontier back in 2023, at least until stakeholders could “jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols … that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts.”

This plea is in line with the other two alternatives Altman mentioned in his briefing earlier this month.