What OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said about AI in India

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who is in India, said that the country should back research on artificial intelligence in ways that can improve its services like health care.

On AI regulation

Touching on his pet subject of regulating AI as it has the potential to spark a mass annihilation kind of event, Altman said that India can play a major role in shaping global rules in this space.

Altman has previously spoken at length about his “greatest fear” that the technology would cause significant harm.

Yesterday, Altman said he would like an IAEA-like nuclear watchdog type of regulator for AI.

However, there are also certain off-limit areas for the watchdog and these include startups. "There should be no regulation on smaller companies. The only regulation we have called for is on ourselves and people bigger," Reuters quoted him as saying.

On Biggest worry

"What I lose the most sleep over is the hypothetical idea that we already have done something really bad by launching ChatGPT." He reiterated that there is an existential risk to humanity from AI and urged for regulation. 

On Digital India

“It is impressive what India has done in terms of national tech. But the government should focus on finding how they can integrate this technology into other services.”

“The main thing that I think is important is figuring out how to integrate these technologies into other services,” Altman said. “And that is an area that I think governments are behind on, and don’t have the answers yet.”

“Some nationally funded AI effort feels like a good idea,” Altman said speaking at an event hosted by the Economic Times.

On ChatGPT in Hindi

Altman said, “It gets difficult to get hold of local languages as they are spoken by few people. But soon systems will be fundamentally good at these things.”

We had a big step forward from GPT 3.5 to 4 at non-English languages, so GPT 4 is pretty good at say the top 20 languages and OK at maybe the top 100,” Bloomberg quoted Altman as saying. “We will be able to push this much further,” he added.

On ChatGPT in India

Altman was truly impressed by the popularity of ChatGPT in India and said that there is lot of early adoption and enthusiasm in the country over this AI tool.

On ChatGPT and Job Losses

Altman saw job losses as the inevitable fallout of every tech revolution. However, he expressed confidence that things would, in the end, not turn out as bad as some are presuming. 

Apart from OpenAi, which is being partnered by Microsoft, the other tech major moving speedily in the field is Google. In fact, there is a global race of sorts going on among tech companies to build their own versions of the chatbot technology in order not to get left behind and end up losing their markets to a startup.

In fact, Google, to protect its fiefdom as well as promote it in this new space, is rolling out new AI tools to help marketers create advertisements.

In India, Google has been developing an AI model that would be able to handle more than 100 Indian languages across speech and text.