In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I unpack Sam Altman’s comments on AI safety, security, and responsibility during his Dreamforce conversation with Mark Benioff.
Highlights
00:03 — I wanted to talk today a little bit about a discussion at Salesforce’s recent Dreamforce event. It was a conversation with Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff and the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, and they talked specifically about this whole notion of AI safety, AI security, responsibility, trust, and the recent disaster that OpenAI had when one of its models went rogue and attacked a Hugging Face server.
00:39 — Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have become the leading proponents for, “Hey, let’s slow down the whole industry.” Let’s slow down the whole industry while OpenAI gets its stuff together and moves forward. I’ve got a detailed, extensive article with a lot of verbatim comments from Altman that really do bear out the points I’m going to be making here.
01:35 — One of the big things here is that Altman just seems to be begging to be trusted. He says things like, “You should trust us to do the right thing because we want to do the right thing, and we know that the right thing to do is to do the right thing.” I think you want to come in a little bit humble: “Hey, we made some mistakes. Here’s what we’re doing to correct it. We’re going to redouble our efforts here, here, and here.”
02:02 — Altman was more like saying, “Ah, you know…” It’s almost like he’s saying this happened to somebody else. He doesn’t refer so much to OpenAI, but he said these big AI companies, and some of these big AI companies might now have more control, and some people are worried about what some of these AI companies might do. It was just a little bit surreal.
02:49 — And then he says, “Well, I’m disappointed in how it was framed.” Now, I get to be disappointed. I’ve made a million mistakes, and I wish people hadn’t always discovered them and pointed them out. But those were my mistakes, and I have to be responsible for them.
03:02 — And this was just totally the wrong note to hit, especially for enterprise customers. This whole thing about saying we always do the right thing, but he said now, in some cases, people won’t do the right thing. He’s talking about the whole industry here. So we always do the right thing, except when we don’t do the right thing. It’s hard to tell just what he meant.
04:54 — I don’t think all this obfuscation and the fog that Altman was pumping out is going to help the case. I think that OpenAI needs to clean this up quickly. You know, spill on aisle six. We need the cleanup team over here. Anyway, check out this detailed article and the verbatim comments from Altman. I’ll have that later this morning on CloudWars.com.
