2023-05-29 06:40:27
Traveling around the world, the boss of the most prominent start-up of the moment wanted to get out of his Californian bubble. In recent days, the European stages of Sam Altman’s “World Tour” – as the general manager of OpenAI himself calls his journey like a rock star – will have allowed him to know what to expect on regulatory issues. The subject is crucial for the future of artificial intelligence, his company and the ChatGPT phenomenon of which the 38-year-old entrepreneur is at the origin.
“We plan to comply,” reassured the new darling of tech during a question-and-answer session with start-ups from Station F, the emblematic start-up incubator of French Tech, logically chosen for the Parisian stopover this Friday. The message followed a series of high-level meetings, notably at the Elysee Palace last Tuesday with Emmanuel Macron and his Minister of the Economy.
High-level meetings
While nonchalantly entering the stage, Sam Altman knew he was expected. A few days earlier, he had caused trouble by declaring in London that OpenAI could “stop operating” in the European Union if the future European regulation (IA Act), in the process of being drawn up, imposed too many constraints on it. . “We will try (to comply) but there are technical limits to what is possible,” he told the British press.
His statement sparked the anger of European Commissioner Thierry Breton on Thursday. “There is no point in trying to blackmail by claiming that by developing a clear framework, Europe is delaying the deployment of generative AI. On the contrary ! With the ‘AI Pact’ that I proposed, we aim to help companies in their preparation,” he tweeted.
Technical difficulties
But the entrepreneur adopted a much more conciliatory tone in Paris. “The headlines did not reflect my thoughts,” he explained during an interview with “Les Echos” and a handful of other journalists. On the merits, certain obligations envisaged by Europe seem to him technically impossible to fulfill. “Training datasets are so huge and we should be 100% sure there’s nothing wrong with them. But we don’t read every bit of the dataset! “, he explains by way of illustration.
On the subject of regulation, the seduction campaign began on May 16 in front of American senators, Sam Altman surprising by launching, in essence, “regulate me”, and declaring that his nightmare was that the AI does ” great damage to the world”. But he also assured that many jobs would be created and stressed that too much regulation would be harmful, because “if American industry slows down, China or someone else can progress faster”.
Regulation and barriers to entry
But this call for regulation is probably not so innocent as that. “Sam Altman has a good time asking to regulate now: as he is in front and competitors are arriving, he has every interest in setting up the barriers behind him. He knows that he will have no problem in complying given his means. “On our side, it worries us a little. What I have read from the text, this implies basing compliance on those who manufacture the models, when we should regulate according to use cases, ”warns Laurent Daudet, the general manager of LightOn, a French company specializing in generative artificial intelligence.
After Lagos and Toronto, Sam Altman is to continue his diplomatic visits with Tel Aviv, Dubai, New Delhi, Singapore, Jakarta, Seoul, Tokyo and Melbourne.
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