OpenAI said a world where everything is automated would be dangerous.
In a blog post on Monday, CEO Sam Altman and OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, said they were “clear-eyed about the risks” of AI, despite the productivity benefits it brings.
“Entirely automating everything is not the future we want,” the duo wrote in the post. “It would be unfulfilling, and it would be dangerous.”
They said that AI systems must remain safe and subject to human control. And as AI systems become more capable, the human roles of “setting directions, making tradeoffs, applying judgment, and bringing values, taste, care, and responsibility to the work” will become more important.
Agentic AI — AI systems that perform tasks and workflows with minimal human intervention — is the biggest buzzword in the tech and business spheres at the moment.
Anthropic and OpenAI are vying to get companies hooked on enterprise accounts for their Claude Code and Codex coding platforms, ahead of both of the companies’ looming IPOs.
OpenAI’s post comes less than a week after Anthropic put out a similar blog post warning about the risks of rapid AI development. An Anthropic employee said in the post that they were not able to keep up with automation, and were at a loss on how to fix problems when the AI systems produced errors.
In the blog post, Anthropic called for a slowdown in AI development to “enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up.”
Other company executives have spoken about human roles that AI can’t automate or replace, such as Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn saying his top designers produce much better work than AI, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff saying the company won’t slow down hiring in its sales department.
“For some things, AI is quite ready to do high-quality work. For some things, it’s just not,” von Ahn said in a May podcast interview. “We’re not going to decrease quality just for the sake of using AI.”
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