Billionaire media mogul Barry Diller has stepped forward to say that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is not, in fact, untrustworthy - despite what some former colleagues and board members have alleged. Speaking at The Wall Street Journal's “Future of Everything” conference this week, Diller vouched for the AI executive who has faced accusations of being manipulative and deceptive.
But Diller, a co-founder of Fox Broadcasting and chairman of IAC and Expedia Group, who is also friendly with Altman, quickly added that this whole trust thing might be a moot point anyway. “One of the big issues with AI is it goes way beyond trust,” Diller said. “It may be that trust is irrelevant because the things that are happening are a surprise to the people who are making those things happen.” He explained that he's spent time with various AI creators, and “they have a sense of wonder themselves. So…it's the great unknown. We don't know. They don't know.”
Diller was responding to a question about whether people should trust Altman to ensure AI benefits humanity - specifically the theoretical form known as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which could one day outperform humans on any task. “We have embarked on something that is going to change almost everything,” Diller said. “It is not under-reported. Now, whether these huge investments are going to come through - I couldn't care less. I'm not invested in it, but progress is going to be made.”
While Diller believes most AI leaders are good stewards - Altman is “a decent person with good values,” he said (though he declined to name which AI leaders he thinks are insincere) - he warned that stewardship isn't the real issue. “The issue is … it's dealing truly with the unknown. They don't know what can happen once you get AGI, and we're close to it. We're not there yet, but we're getting closer and closer, quicker and quicker. And we must think about guardrails,” Diller noted. Otherwise, he cautioned, “another force, an AGI force, will do it themselves. And once that happens, once you unleash that, there's no going back.”