‘Transformational’ or ‘civilization destruction’: Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and other business leaders on AI

In March, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said the company’s latest and best AI model GPT-4 “kind of sucks.”

“I think it is our job to live a few years in the future and remember that the tools we have now are going to kind of suck, looking backward at them, and that’s how we make sure the future is better,” Altman told the computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman.

As head of the company that kicked off the current AI craze after releasing ChatGPT in November 2022, Altman has said a lot about the future of AI in both the near-term and the long-term. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, Altman said he’s not too worried about the technology’s impact on the 2024 presidential election.

“I believe that America is going to be fine no matter what happens in this election,” he said. “I believe that AI is going to be fine no matter what happens after this election.”

He also said people shouldn’t be too concerned about AI stealing jobs.

“People will go on with their lives,” Altman said. “We are making a tool that is impressive, but humans are going to do their human things.”

But Altman has also warned about “very subtle societal misalignments” that can make AI “go horribly wrong.”

Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman then left in 2018, has been wary of the future of AI, leading a call for a six-month pause on its development.

“AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production, in the sense that it is, it has the potential — however small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial — it has the potential of civilization destruction,” Musk said in an interview with Tucker Carlson in April 2023.

Musk is still working on his own AI products, including a $1 billion supercomputer and a chatbot rival to ChatGPT called Grok.

Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, called AI “extraordinary and possibly transformational” in an annual letter to shareholders, and compared the technology’s impact to the “printing press, the steam engine, electricity, computing and the Internet, among others.”

“Over time, we anticipate that our use of AI has the potential to augment virtually every job, as well as impact our workforce composition,” Dimon wrote. “It may reduce certain job categories or roles, but it may create others as well. As we have in the past, we will aggressively retrain and redeploy our talent to make sure we are taking care of our employees if they are affected by this trend.”

Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger called the semiconductor pioneer’s $8.5 billion funding from the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act “a victory for Americans’ national economy, but also our national security.”

“AI is supercharging the digital revolution and everything digital needs semiconductors,” Gelsinger said after Intel’s funding was announced. “CHIPS Act support will help to ensure that Intel and the U.S. stay at the forefront of the AI era as we build a resilient and sustainable semiconductor supply chain to power our nation’s future.”

Jensen Huang, chief executive of chipmaker Nvidia, which makes the world’s most desired AI hardware, said at the company’s annual tech conference in March that the world needs “bigger GPUs” — or graphics processing units, which power some of the world’s leading AI models like ChatGPT.

When asked about the arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI) — the point when AI reaches human-level knowledge — Huang said it depends on how AGI is defined, but if it consists of AI passing tests, it could be close.

“If I gave an AI ... every single test that you can possibly imagine, you make that list of tests and put it in front of the computer science industry, and I’m guessing in five years time, we’ll do well on every single one,” Huang said at an economic forum at Stanford University.

During a conversation with Oregon State University President Jayathi Murthy, Huang called AI a “new industrial revolution... because an industrial revolution produces something new that was impossible to produce in the past.”

“I believe that artificial intelligence is the technology industry’s single greatest contribution to social elevation, to lift all of the people that have historically been left behind,” Huang said during the conversation.

“Because programming is so hard, the number of people who have benefitted from this, putting it to use for their economic prosperity, has been limited,” Huang said, noting that people who know programming languages have more opportunities.

But with AI, he said, “you essentially have a collaborator with you at all times, essentially have a tutor at all times, and so I think the ability for AI to elevate all of the people left behind is quite extraordinary.”

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has called AI “as revolutionary as mobile phones and the internet,” and said the technology is going “to supercharge the innovation pipeline.”

But he’s also warned of its limitations.

“If it’s a problem that humans are not good at dealing with, then present techniques don’t create some novel approach,” Gates said about AI in an interview with Dax Shepard on the Armchair Expert podcast.

Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy said in an annual letter to shareholders that the company wants in on generative AI, and is optimistic much of it will be built on its cloud computing service.

“Generative AI may be the largest technology transformation since the cloud (which itself, is still in the early stages), and perhaps since the Internet,” Jassy wrote. “There has never been a time in Amazon’s history where we’ve felt there is so much opportunity to make our customers’ lives better and easier.”

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said the company’s AI copilot tools “are making the age of AI real for people and businesses everywhere.”

“We are rapidly infusing AI across every layer of the tech stack and for every role and business process to drive productivity gains for our customers,” he said.

Microsoft has a multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, which gives Microsoft customers access to AI infrastructure, models, and tools built by both companies.

“We formed our partnership with OpenAI around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratize AI as a new technology platform,” Nadella said.

Google parent Alphabet paused its AI model’s ability to generate images of people in February after users pointed out that Gemini was making historically inaccurate images of people, such as racially diverse Nazi-era German soldiers.

CEO Sundar Pichai called it “completely unacceptable” and said the company was “working around the clock” to address its issues.

“No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes,” Pichai said.

Despite the controversy, Pichai has been optimistic for the future of AI.

In April 2023, Pichai called AI “the most profound technology humanity is working on. More profound than fire, electricity, or anything that we have done in the past.”

“We are developing technology which, for sure, one day will be far more capable than anything we’ve ever seen before,” he said during an interview on 60 Minutes.