In his wide-ranging interview with Tucker Carlson, the OpenAI CEO described the weight of overseeing a technology that hundreds of millions of people now use daily. It’s less about the Terminator-esque scenarios or rogue robots. Rather, for Altman, it’s the ordinary, almost invisible tweaks and tradeoffs his team makes every day. It’s when the model refuses a question, how it frames an answer, when it decides to push back, and when it lets something pass.
Those small design choices, Altman explained, are replicated billions of times across the globe, shaping how people think and act in ways he can’t fully track.
“What I lose sleep over is that very small decisions we make about how a model may behave slightly differently are probably touching hundreds of millions of people,” he said. “That impact is so big.”
One example that weighs heavily: suicide. Altman noted roughly 15,000 people take their lives each week worldwide, and if 10% of them are ChatGPT users, roughly 1,500 people with suicidal thoughts may have spoken to the system—and then killed themselves anyway.
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