Sam Altman, the cofounder and CEO of OpenAI, is seemingly caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to the European Union’s newly proposed legislation for artificial intelligence. With the EU taking the lead in creating stringent rules and regulations to govern the use of AI technology, Altman has warned that his company may be forced to cease its operations in Europe if it’s unable to comply with the stipulations set out in the law. On a recent tour of some European capitals, Altman indicated that the nuances of the EU’s AI Act must be taken into consideration, and emphasised that OpenAI will try to abide by the law.
The AI Act was recently adopted by a majority of the European parliament and is meant to protect European users, as well as to provide guidelines for using AI technology. Altman has reportedly expressed concern over the Act’s designation of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4 systems as “high risk”. Additionally, he is worried that the act would obligate generative AI to reveal how their systems were trained and the copyrighted material used for producing text and images.
Back in March, the release of OpenAI’s GPT-4 faced backlash from AI enthusiasts, who were dismayed that the company withheld the data, as well as related information such as training costs and creation process.
Considering the many dangers associated with AI, the proposed legislation carries a certain level of safety and transparency regulations. Altman has suggested that some of these provisions could be too burdensome for OpenAI to adhere to, prompting his initial threat to pull OpenAI out of Europe. However, he later clarified his words via Twitter, assuring followers that he had no intentions of leaving.
While his volte-face is a clear sign of Altman’s inner conflict, it’s understandable that OpenAI’s major investor, Microsoft, is expecting great returns following their hefty investment. As such, Altman seeks regulation which is fair and non-restrictive, wanting to draw up a law which does not bear adversely on OpenAI’s profits. He proposed the formation of a governmental agency to manage AI activities of above a certain scale, thereby allocating licenses and revoking them in case of misuse.
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory which conducts strides in the realm of Advanced Research. Founded by world-renowned researchers such as Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman, the company attempts to pioneerer natural language processing, reinforcement learning, robotics, and machine learning. Microsoft has financially backed the firm, with a view to leveraging the ground-breaking technology to advance the realms of AI.
