OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says AI tools will shape the future

Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, said he thinks the future of artificial intelligence entails figuring out new ways to build AI models beyond training them on existing knowledge.

Just like a human can’t absorb unlimited knowledge from reading textbooks, he said, he doesn’t believe AI models will simply need more and more data — but he said he’s unsure how exactly the technology will continue to grow smarter once it surpasses that threshold.

At the 20th Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado on Wednesday, Altman compared the rise of artificial intelligence to the discovery of agriculture or the invention of industrial-era machines. (NBCUniversal News Group, the parent company of NBC News, is the festival’s media partner.)

“People are going to go use these tools to invent the future that we all collectively live in,” he told NBC News anchor Lester Holt. “What one person can already do now before ChatGPT existed is an impressive leap, and by the time we get to GPT-6 or -7, what one person can do will be incredibly increased. And I’m very excited for that, like I think that is the story of the world getting better.”

But workers in many industries, especially creatives across art and entertainment, aren’t as optimistic as Altman is about the prospect of increasingly advanced AI tools. OpenAI and other companies are regularly accused of using copyrighted material from newspapers, artists and other content creators to train their AI models.

Others fear the consequences of deepfakes and other types of AI-generated disinformation that are already proliferating online, with regulation still largely lacking from technology platforms and governments alike.

It was “inevitable” that AI technology would be capable of such more nefarious uses, Altman said. As the first elections around the globe in which AI is a key technological component take place, Altman said, deepfakes remain top of mind — and there may even be other ways people try to misuse AI that OpenAI hasn’t caught wind of yet.

OpenAI has also been criticized for its now-paused voice assistant Sky, whose voice many online pointed out sounded eerily similar to the voice of actor Scarlett Johansson. OpenAI has said that Sky’s voice wasn’t an imitation of Johansson’s and that it was the natural speaking voice of a different actor the company hired.

Asked whether OpenAI would bolster that claim by allowing the public to hear from that actor, Altman said the company would support her if she chose to speak about it.

Altman was joined by Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky onstage at the festival, which is hosted by the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit organization founded in 1949 aimed at driving global change through public dialogue and leadership development.

The two Silicon Valley tech executives have built a strong relationship over more than a decade. Altman and Chesky became friends years ago at the tech startup accelerator Y Combinator, and Chesky helped negotiate Altman’s reinstatement when OpenAI fired him last year.

Altman said at Wednesday’s panel that Chesky was an “enormous help” after his ouster, which he described as “obviously a super painful experience.”

OpenAI, part of a generation of startups that have become giants in AI, catalyzed the explosion of generative AI technologies that ramped up after it launched ChatGPT in 2022. In recent years, generative AI models have made accessible a variety of tools able to generate hyperrealistic videos, compose humanlike songs and create conversational chat agents, among other tasks.

Many in the AI industry have theorized about the possible creation of artificial general intelligence, a type of AI that would be able to understand knowledge, as opposed to merely recognize patterns, which is how the language models of today operate.

Despite fears of the implications of such advancement in AI, Altman said, even those technologies wouldn’t be autonomous beings — they would serve as tools.And for him, there is no end goal to the development of AI. Instead, he said, he views it as a gradual evolution.

“I don’t think of it as a race. I understand why that’s a very compelling, dramatic way to talk about it,” he said. “I think that there may be a race between nation-states at some point, but the companies that are developing this now, I think everyone feels the stakes, the need to get this right.”

Angela Yang is a culture and trends reporter for NBC News.