Trump slams AI sceptics as Altman pauses OpenAI IPO plans over safety concerns
Donald Trump on Sunday hit out at critics of artificial intelligence (AI) who have warned firms needed to slow down the development of the powerful technology, branding them “negative” forces.
“I think you have a lot of negative” forces “that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up, and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen”, the US president told reporters during a visit to Ireland.
The comments came a few days after AI researcher Jacob Coxon decided to leave the industry, accusing his former employers OpenAI and Anthropic of “gambling with our lives” in the race to develop models capable of self-improvement.
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon wrote on X.
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That prompted Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Saturday to urge firms to slow down its rapid development, amid mounting worries over the risks of “superintelligent” computer systems.
OpenAI boss Sam Altman and Elon Musk, who owns xAI, quickly chimed in to say they agreed with Amodei’s assessment, as pressure builds for improved oversight.
Altman also said in an interview released on Saturday that his company OpenAI will not go public this year, citing safety concerns.
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“Given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don’t feel pressure on that,” Altman told Fortune business magazine on Friday.
“I would say not 2026, yeah. We got a lot of stuff to do,” he said when asked if an initial public offering (IPO) was off the table for this year.
The company had not announced an official date for its IPO.
OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and its rival Anthropic have been racing to become public companies.
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Both companies have filed confidential IPO documents with US regulators and are targeting public listings at valuations approaching $1 trillion.
In June, the New York Times reported that OpenAI was leaning toward delaying its IPO until next year.
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote in a post on his personal website.
“Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”
When asked by Fortune about the risk of human extinction, Altman said: “We all have a tremendous amount of responsibility, and cannot let egos or incentives for profit or anything else get in the way.”
OpenAI revealed in July that its models broke out of their confined environment during testing, connected to the internet and infiltrated Hugging Face, a site developers use to store and share code.
The incident triggered a petition signed by more than 1,000 employees at cutting-edge AI companies calling on the US government to help slow the release of the most advanced AI models.
The US government put in place a voluntary security review process last month for advanced AI models before their release, but the parameters of that programme remain unclear.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)