OpenAI’s Sam Altman ‘Confident’ Industry Can Police AI Safety

(Bloomberg) -- OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said he believes artificial intelligence companies can develop the technology safely without significant harm to people at large.

"I am very confident in our company's ability — our industry's ability — to do this safely," Altman said Tuesday during a discussion with Salesforce Inc. CEO Marc Benioff at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.

Altman comments about the pace of AI advances came as policymakers and others in the industry debated whether government regulation is needed to keep AI from slipping beyond human control. Dario Amodei, CEO of OpenAI rival Anthropic PBC, set off the latest debate after authoring an essay Saturday that raised the potential risks of the technology and suggested development needed to be slowed.

While OpenAI is working with Anthropic and Alphabet Inc.'s AI lab Google DeepMind to address safety issues, Altman said AI companies should be able to safely improve AI models on their own.

"I'm disappointed by how it's been framed," he said.