At ADIPEC in Abu Dhabi, Sam Altman says humans must control the future

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at the opening of the ADIPEC exhibition in Abu Dhabi that AI should not make decisions for humanity. He said models had surpassed the best scientists within a year, while energy had become the industry’s main constraint.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that people, not artificial intelligence, must retain control over the future. “There are many things we can debate, but in this case, we believe there should be no room for debate,” he said on November 2 at the opening ceremony of the ADIPEC oil and gas exhibition in Abu Dhabi.

According to Altman, there should be no “delegation of authority” to artificial intelligence: the technology must remain a tool created for people and serving people. He added that the industry increasingly needed to prove that it could prevent serious incidents related to system safety.

Smarter than the best scientists

Altman said AI had crossed an important threshold within a year: at the beginning of the year, models generally lagged behind the strongest scientists, but they now mostly surpassed them and were capable of performing a significant share of white-collar work. He added that he was confident society would cope with these changes.

Sam Altman on the ADIPEC stage in Abu Dhabi during a conversation with The National’s editor-in-chief

Energy is the main challenge

Asked about the main challenge, Altman answered with one word: “Energy.” Energy consumption for each request is falling sharply, but the more efficient AI becomes, the more actively people use it, he explained. He said the AI and energy industries had obligations to society to meet this demand.

Altman also said OpenAI had solved one of the “millennium problems” in mathematics using 10,000 AI agents that worked for about four days on a model of GPT that has not yet been released. This claim cannot currently be independently verified.