The CEO of OpenAI, the company responsible for creating artificial be intelligence chatbot ChatGPT and image generator Dall-E 2, said “regulation of AI is essential” on Tuesday as he testified in front of a Senate judiciary committee panel.
In his first appearance in front of Congress, Sam Altman said he supported regulatory guardrails for the technology that would enable the benefits of artificial intelligence while minimizing the harms.
“We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models,” Altman said in his prepared remarks. “For example, the US government might consider licensing and testing requirements for development and release of AI models above a threshold of capabilities.”
Altman and Gary Marcus, emeritus professor of psychology and neural science at New York University, both called for a new regulatory agency for the technology.
“I think AI is going to be such a large part of our future and is so complicated and moving so fast,” Marcus said at the hearing. “It’s a step in that direction to have an agency whose full-time job is to do this.”
In addition to creating a new agency that would license AI, Altman suggested establishing a set of safety standards and a specific test that a model has to pass before it can be deployed and allowing independent auditors to examine the models before they are launched. Altman also argued that existing frameworks would not be the right way to regulate the system.
“For a very new technology we need a new framework,” Altman said.
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While OpenAi is building tools that “one day will help us make new discoveries and address some of humanity’s biggest challenges like climate changes and curing cancer”, the current systems aren’t capable of doing these things yet, according to Altman.
He also said that while he believes the benefits of the tools deployed so far “vastly outweigh the risks” the company conducts extensive testing and implements robust safety and monitoring systems before releasing any new system. “Ensuring their safety is vital to our work,” he said.
“OpenAI was founded on the belief that artificial intelligence has the ability to improve nearly aspect of our lives but that also that it creates serious risks that we have to work together to manage,” Altman said.
Senators Josh Hawley and Richard Blumenthal say this hearing is just the first step in understanding the technology. Hawley said that the technology will be “transformative in ways we can’t even imagine, with implications for Americans’ elections, jobs and security”.
