OpenAI chief seeks to calm fears on job losses

PARIS, May 27, (AFP) - The boss of OpenAI, the firm behind the massively popular ChatGPT bot, said that his firm's technology would not destroy the job market as he sought to calm fears about the march of artificial intelligence (AI).

Sam Altman, on a global tour to charm national leaders and powerbrokers, said in Paris that AI would not -- as some have warned -- wipe out whole sectors of the workforce through automation.

“This idea that AI is going to progress to a point where humans don't have any work to do or don't have any purpose has never resonated with me,” he said.

Asked about the media industry, where outlets already use AI to generate stories, Altman said ChatGPT should instead be like giving a journalist 100 assistants to help them research and come up with ideas.

ChatGPT burst into the spotlight last year, demonstrating an ability to generate essays, poems and conversations from brief prompts.

Microsoft later laid out billions of dollars to support OpenAI and now uses the firm's technology in several of its products -- sparking a race with Google.

Altman, a 38-year-old emerging star of Silicon Valley, received rapturous

welcomes from leaders everywhere from Lagos to London. Though earlier this week, he seemed to annoy the EU by hinting that his firm could leave the bloc if they regulate severely. He insisted to a group of journalists on the sidelines

of the Paris event that the headlines were not fair and he had no intention of leaving the bloc -rather, OpenAI was likely to open an office in Europe in the future.

The success of ChatGPT -- which

has been used by politicians to write speeches and proved itself capable of passing tough exams -has thrust Altman into a global spotlight.

OpenAI was formed in 2015 with investors including Altman and billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk, who left the firm in 2018 and has bashed it in recent months. Musk, who has his own AI ambitions, said he came up with the name OpenAI, invested $100 million in it, was betrayed when the company turned itself from non-profit to profit-making in 2018, and has said Microsoft now effectively runs the company.

Altman said he wanted to focus on the mission of OpenAI, which he said was to “maximise the benefits” to society of AI and particularly Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) -- the much-vaunted future where machines will master all sorts of tasks, not just one.

A major criticism of his products is that the firm does not publish the sources it uses to train its models. As well as copyright issues, critics argue that users should know who is responsible for answering their questions, and if those replies used material from offensive or racist webpages.