New York, March 6 – Elon Musk thinks that Open AI, run by Sam Altman, is shirking its responsibilities on the matter. Tesla’s chief executive filed a lawsuit last week claiming Altman’s shop is being run for profits instead of the greater good.
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What does Elon Musk is saying on Sam Altman
The whole dispute rests on the assumption that it is up to heroic tech entrepreneurs to shape the development of an existentially dangerous technology. Regulating issues affecting the fate of everyone is the remit of a democratic government. Artificial intelligence is no different.
It is easy to be pessimistic about Musk’s attack on Open AI. He launched his own AI company, xAI, in July last year. It is a bit player compared to Altman’s Microsoft-backed outfit. Any effort to force OpenAI to open up its technology or relinquish funding, as this lawsuit demands, could weaken the company and allow Musk’s version to take market share.
That’s bad news for Altman. The worse news for humanity is that the proceeding posits either Musk or Altman to be arbiters of the species’ best practices. AI promises to totally reshape how people interact with the world around them, from entertainment to health to information.
Mapping that interaction shouldn’t be the responsibility of one human. In fact, democratic governments elected by an entire population debate regularly about guardrails around existentially risky technologies and forces.
Musk has already shown the dangers of foregoing those guardrails. He was lauded for allowing Ukrainians to use his company’s Starlink satellites to facilitate communications after Russia invaded the country. According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, however, Russian troops have access to “thousands” of Starlink systems. Biographer Walter Isaacson wrote that Musk restricted access for Ukrainian forces poised to strike near Crimea. And Republican Congressman Mike Gallagher has claimed that Musk may have withheld Starlink service over Taiwan.
Tech founders, including Musk and Altman, regularly preach the libertarian notion that governments meddle too much, or in the wrong way. It’s one thing to argue over entrepreneurialism when it comes to gadgets. But when it comes to defense and technology, their idiosyncratic ideologies may be more dangerous than even corporate profit-maximizing.
Regulating their actions isn’t antithetical to the foundations of either U.S. political party, either. Both Democrats and Republicans agree that the actions of social media firms like Meta Platforms should be tempered. If cutting-edge technologies can tip the balance of global power, forcing AI companies to use their smarts to publicly identify whether a person is interacting with algorithms or humans, say, would be a start. At the very least, the watchdog of that technology shouldn’t be its makers.
Elon Musk sued ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and its Chief Executive Sam Altman on Feb. 29, saying the company abandoned its mission to develop technology for the benefit of humanity. The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco, alleges breach of contract and says that the company is instead focused on making money.
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