OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently expressed his concern on the European Union’s attempt to regulate artificial intelligence, warning the company may have to pull out from the region if it can’t comply with the regulations, contradicting his attitude at the beginning of this month when he advised against AI regulation on the US Congress. During a panel at the University College London, Altman argued the right approach should be a combination of the traditional regulations present both in Europe and the US, instead of relying on self-regulation for AI.
This change of tone has been met with criticism by Nicole Gill, the executive director and co-founder of the group Accountable Tech, who denounced Altman’s trust in AI to regulate itself. In her opinion-piece for Fast Company, Gill compared Altman to Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Meta, saying “lawmakers appear prone to put their trust in Altman’s had to regulate under the cover of ‘innovation’, despite the evident danger that this technology poses.”
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and deployment lab, co-owned by tech giant Microsoft and several leading tech experts. Founded in 2015, the company’s mission is to ensure AI’s benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. It produces state-of-the-art technologies designed to enable several different applications.
Sam Altman is a renowned entrepreneur, investor, software engineer, and a pundit on artificial intelligence. He is the co-founder of Y Combinator, a renowned startup accelerator, and is the current CEO of OpenAI. Altman was heavily involved in creating the field of online education, and is famously attributed for his efforts in bringing open-source web applications to life.
