Five takeaways from Sam Altman’s conversation with The Economic Times

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman spoke on a wide array of themes — from the investor frenzy around generative artificial intelligence (AI) to the fears of rampant unemployment that would accompany the adoption of the technology — during his conversation with The Economic Times in New Delhi on Wednesday.

ETtech looks at the five highlights of the conversation:

Investor frenzy: Asked to put on his investor hat, Altman said there’s, “Too much frenzy around AI in the short term. But it’s very under-hyped in the long term.”


ET reported on May 11 that some venture capital firms focused on the deep tech sector are looking for startups with proprietary training models, while others are evaluating investments in the applied-AI space, where companies build on top of large language models like the generative pre-trained transformer.

Job loss: Altman agreed that perhaps the biggest fear around AI adoption was of job losses that would follow across sectors. “In two generations, we kind of adapt to any labour market change, and we see new jobs that are usually better. That is going to happen here too. Some jobs are going to go away. But there will be new, better jobs that are difficult to imagine,” he said.

However, he pointed out that the speed of change might be different. “The thing that might be different about this is the speed at which this could happen, and I think it would require a change to the socio-economic contract and the way governments think about this’’.

Competition with smaller firms: Altman said there shouldn’t be any AI-related regulation on smaller startups. “We have explicitly said there should be no regulation on smaller companies. The only regulation we have called for is on ourselves and people bigger’’, he said.

Asked about the future of startups from India which have much smaller funding than OpenAI, Altman said it would be challenging for them to compete with the bigger companies as they have more processing power that’s needed to build larger models.

Ethics & AI: Apart from job losses, regulating AI has been one of the biggest concerns across the world with several nations working overtime to come up with guidelines that can manage this breakthrough technology. Altman, too, has been vocal about AI regulation.

Responding to a question on ethical guidelines in AI, the OpenAI chief said: “Those are not OpenAI's decisions to make. It's for the world to democratise. Our recent funding into such projects is to help enable that’’, and added, “I think the world should come together. This is an existential risk. If the governments cannot, we will ask the companies to do it’’.

India & ChatGPT: Altman said there is very high adoption of its AI chatbot ChatGPT in India.

“India has truly embraced ChatGPT. There has been a lot of early adoption and real enthusiasm among users’’, Altman added.

He also lauded the country’s efforts in building technology such as UPI, Aadhaar, and the India stack.