Sam Altman, entrepreneur, CEO of OpenAI and general oddball, has been speaking out about the AI snake oil salesmen who promise the moon on a stick when asked what the technology is about to deliver.
In a wide-ranging interview with the David Senra podcast, Altman appeared to single out Anthropic founder Dario Amodei – previously vice president of research at OpenAI – who last week made a rare post on X to outline what was needed for AI to fully gain public trust.
“I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust – at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliché than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive,” Amodei wrote.
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“The thing that will work is *actually curing cancer*. I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world.”
It is this which is thought to have prompted Altman’s claims in his interview that “there are some people in the AI field who effectively say we’re going to give the world a cure to all disease and we’re going to make stuff really cheap in exchange for people giving up their autonomy and impact over the future and power, in the name of safety”.
Altman added: “There will be people that have access to huge amounts of wealth and power and other people just get a pretty good everything. This is a terrible sales pitch.
“Like, ‘dear peasants, we will bequeath upon you these gifts of a cure for cancer and material wealth and great entertainment. And you stop complaining and we’ll make all the decisions about the future and just trust us, we’ll be better than dictators.’”
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But perhaps there is another AI overlord whose boastful claims Altman may be mocking – one who just a year ago claimed that the current trajectory of AI development suggested that it could be close to curing cancer.
This utopian entrepreneur wrote: “If AI stays on the trajectory that we think it will, then amazing things will be possible. Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer. Or with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to provide customised tutoring to every student on Earth.”
This person in the AI field effectively saying they were going to give the world a cure to all disease was, of course, one Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.
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