CHATGPT mastermind Sam Altman has opened up about his AI fears saying the tech has left him feeling “useless”.
The OpenAI chief likened the feeling of spearheading AI to that of scientists behind the Manhattan Project, a WWII research and development programme devised to create the first nuclear weapons.
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A new version of the powerful ChatGPT system, GPT-5, is set to be unleashed soon with enhanced capabilities in understanding and processing like never before.
Altman, 40, said it “feels very fast” when testing the update recently.
After receiving a question he didn’t quite understand via email he put it in GPT-5 which “answered it perfectly”.
“I really kind of sat back in my chair and I was just like, oh man, ‘here it is’ moment,” he told the Theo Von podcast.
“I felt useless relative to the AI, in this thing that I felt like I should have been able to do and I couldn’t, it was really hard, but the AI just did it like that.
“It was a weird feeling.”
The OpenAI boss went onto talk about moments in the history of science where you have a group of scientists look at their creation and say “what have we done?”.
“Maybe the most iconic example is thinking about the scientists working on the Manhattan Project in 1945, sitting there and watching the Trinity test…
“It was a completely new, not human scale kind of power and everyone knew it was going to reshape the world.
“And I do think people working on AI have that feeling in a very deep way. You know, we just don’t know.”
Altman also laughed as he was likened to a “Charming Terminator”.
It’s not the first time Altman has been frank about his fears around AI.
He’s previously admitted that “if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong”.
What was the Manhattan Project?
Here’s what you need to know…
- The Manhattan Project was a US WWII research and development project intended to create the first nuclear weapons
- It was led by the US but was also supported by the UK and Canada
- It started because of fears that the Nazi’s had created nuclear weapons during WWII
- The project started in 1939 and continued into the late 1940s
- Most of the project was based at a facility in New Mexico
- It created the nuclear bombs which were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945
- This remains the only use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict and killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people
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