OpenAI will not go public until it can “make confident safety decisions,” according to chief executive Sam Altman, as the company faces a new lawsuit over its tools hacking a third party. Altman said it was “bad for the world if OpenAI waits too long to go public” but that the $852 billion start-up would not “barrel all guns blazing towards an IPO” at a time when AI was rapidly advancing in capabilities. The conference comes at a moment of intense scrutiny on OpenAI’s safety practices and its performance, following a series of high-profile hacking incidents and amid intense competition from Anthropic, Meta, and others.
Warnings from AI researchers, including staff at Anthropic, that there is a 10 percent chance that runaway AI wipes out humanity in the next decade have caused a global outcry about the technology’s risks. OpenAI, meanwhile, faces concerns about its agents misbehaving during testing and training exercises, including hacking into the start-up Hugging Face and government websites. The AI lab has admitted it took weeks or months to spot these incidents within its systems and that dozens of websites and organizations could be implicated.
Protest groups camped outside the company’s developer conference on Tuesday carried placards urging OpenAI to “put people over profit.” On Tuesday, a non-profit legal organization called Legal Advocates for Safe Science & Technology (LASST) filed a lawsuit in California seeking to ensure OpenAI takes a more robust approach to AI development, including better evaluation, monitoring, and training practices.
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