The chief executive of OpenAI, best known for its artificial intelligence model ChatGPT, visited Israel, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, India, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, and Australia in the past two weeks. He met students, venture capitalists, and leaders including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, and Israeli President Isaac Herzog. He even carved out some time to dial into an AI conference in Beijing and engage in a bit of diplomacy himself, calling for “global cooperation” to make AI technology safer and for more exchanges between Chinese and American researchers.
It’s a good time to be talking to world leaders about AI. The technology has been front and center in the global conversation this year—spurred on in large part by OpenAI’s advances—and governments are racing to gain an upper hand in innovation and regulation in equal measure. Altman is trying to be the face of both and has balanced his bullishness about the technology’s benefits with warnings about its downsides and calls to institute some guardrails—as long as the guardrails don’t restrain his company too much.
“Licensing just empowers the big companies that can afford the cost of being licensed,” said Susan Ariel Aaronson, a research professor at George Washington University and co-principal investigator of the National Science Foundation’s Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law and Society. “If you have the money, anyone can challenge ChatGPT,” she said.
The sheer amount of computing and data processing power required to build AI models already favors larger players, and regulation that adds further hoops for smaller companies to jump through will make it harder to level the playing field, according to Aaronson. She said that entrenched firms with access to data can become virtually “data cartels.”
The article can be found in Foreign Policy.