ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/Getty
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that "all of the sci-fi stuff" keeps him up at night.
- The tech CEO said it's easy to imagine where AI advancement could go wrong.
- But Altman is more afraid of "subtle societal misalignments" than killer robots.
Ever wondered what keeps Sam Altman up at night?
"Easy," Altman said at the World Government Summit, where he made a virtual appearance. "It's all of the sci-fi stuff."
The OpenAI CEO said that science-fiction writers have found unbelievably creative ways to imagine what could go wrong with AI — and they've been doing it for decades.
"I think most of them are like comical," Altman said. "But there are some things in there that are easy to imagine where things really go wrong."
Altman said he's less concerned about killer robots and more interested in "very subtle societal misalignments."
He describes a reality where AI systems are being used in society without evil intent, but things still "just go horribly wrong."
While Altman didn't elaborate on the societal misalignments that could lead things to go so far south, he's expressed fears about the future of AI in the past.
The OpenAI CEO tweeted last February that regulation was critical to AI development and that the world needed time to figure it out. Altman's opposition to speedy AI advancement was suspected to be part of his brief firing back in November.
Since then, the CEO has been pretty quiet about these concerns and hasn't gone into specifics about what worries him.
OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment.
Despite the broader fears that keep him up at night, Altman said that he believes that things will go "tremendously right." That, he said, is what gets him up every morning.
"I think we can easily imagine a world in the not-so-distant future where everybody has a better life than they have today," Altman said.