Cure cancer with AI, and the doubters will understand the hype. That may be Silicon Valley’s standard pitch, but Sam Altman says it is not ambitious enough.
Speaking to Bloomberg Television on Thursday, the OpenAI CEO said that the tech industry has done a “terrible job” making the positive case for AI, as public trust in the technology has soured.
The utopian view taken by some tech leaders is that AI will eventually lead to a period of abundance in which people no longer need to work, and cures are found for diseases like cancer.
“I don’t think a cure for cancer is enough,” Altman said. “I mean, it’s a wonderful thing to have, obviously, but we should set our sights higher.”
Altman said AI should also “enable a boom in creativity and entrepreneurship,” but that this has “been lost in the messaging.”
Americans have increasingly turned against AI this year. Data center backlash has become a political flash point, schools are banning AI in the classroom, and workers worry about AI disrupting the job market.
About 40% of Americans predict that AI will have a negative impact on society, according to the Pew Research Center, while only 16% said it would be positive.
“It’s very, very important to us that this technology is something where people get more autonomy and power and not less, and I think people rightly get afraid when they feel like AI leaders might not want that for them,” Altman said.
Altman’s cancer comments stand in contrast to Dario Amodei, the CEO of AI rival Anthropic, who said last month that the way to win over the public is for AI to “actually” cure cancer.
“At this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliché than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive,” Amodei wrote in a rare X post. “The most accurate criticism of AI companies, including Anthropic, is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world.”
Altman and Amodei do, however, share the same view that it’s better to have a dialogue about AI — even when those conversations are difficult.
“The world should want us to think about all the ways that it could go wrong, to talk about what we see coming, but not to sort of like, stir up doom, or concentrate power for ourselves,” Altman told Bloomberg, adding that solving those problems can only happen with open debate.
“And that has been our intention, but clearly sometimes it ends up scaring people,” Altman said.
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