People, not artificial intelligence, must stay in control of the future, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said on Monday.
“There are a lot of other things we can debate, but on this one, we think there must be no room for debate,” he said in conversation with The National's Editor-in-Chief Mina Al-Oraibi.
Speaking at the opening ceremony of Adipec in Abu Dhabi, Mr Altman said there “should not be a handoff to AI” and that the technology “needs to be a tool built for people and needs to serve people, not the other way around”.
“I can’t believe that this differentiates us from other AI companies, but it does,” he said. “This is a value that we intend to really go fight for. And I wish it didn’t need to be said.”
The remarks followed OpenAI's agreements with Abu Dhabi, covering energy, education, investment and government. These include a deal with Adnoc and Abu Dhabi technology group G42 to use OpenAI’s most advanced models on the energy industry’s hardest problems.
Mr Altman’s message was that AI has crossed a threshold. By his account, it has gone from trailing the world’s best scientists at the start of the year to mostly outperforming them. Its demand for power is growing just as fast, he said.
“AI was mostly not as smart as our smartest scientists, and now it’s mostly smarter than them,” Mr Altman said, adding that AI could now do “a lot of parts” of many white-collar jobs.
He said he believed society would “navigate through this all fine”. But he warned that the industry must show it can prevent harm as its systems become more capable.
“How do we guarantee, and how do we give the world comfort with that guarantee, that we are going to avoid serious safety and alignment incidents?” he said. “I think that’ll be increasingly important for our industry to demonstrate.”
Energy challenge
In a quick-fire round, Mr Altman was asked what challenge he faces today. He answered with one word: “Energy.”
He said the energy needed for each AI query had dropped sharply, but demand kept climbing. Six years ago, OpenAI’s heaviest internal user consumed about 100,000 tokens a month. Today, that figure is roughly the global per-capita average, and the top user consumes about 500 billion, he added.
Costs could fall “in almost every way, except, you know, atoms are still atoms”, Mr Altman said. He called power “the very dominant factor” in how much AI the world can use. He said he hoped AI would deliver “a net gain for energy availability in the world”.
Mr Altman also said OpenAI had solved one of the Millennium Prize problems, a set of unsolved mathematics problems. He said the work used 10,000 agents running an upcoming GPT model for about four days, collaborating with “no hierarchy”. The claim could not immediately be verified independently.
He praised the UAE as “consistently the most forward-looking country in the world for AI adoption”, saying about 80 per cent of young people in the country were using ChatGPT.
