OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testifies before Congress on AI innovation, oversight concerns

Yahoo Finance tech reporters Allie Garfinkle and Dan Howley discuss OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testifying before Congress, how AI will impact society, and the pros and cons to AI regulation.

Video Transcript

RACHELLE AKUFFO: Well, business leaders, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman gather to face a Senate Judiciary Committee over the growing presence of AI. And this comes as lawmakers grow weary of the potential risks tied to artificial intelligence. Here is what we expect to learn from today's hearing is Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley and Allie Garfinkle. So Allie let's first start with you.

ALLIE GARFINKLE: So first thing's first here, Rachelle-- there is a lot of talk about history. Now why, right? First thing's first, I mean, I don't remember the last time I heard the phrase printing press so often in anything I was covering, let alone a congressional hearing. There's also a lot of talk about the Industrial Revolution. But why am I bringing up these historic parallels? Because they're trying to communicate the gravity of the concerns these senators have.

Right off the bat, the Industrial Revolution parallel, for example, ties back to jobs, concerns about worker displacement. And in this first hour of the hearing, Altman did, to his credit, immediately acknowledged that, yes, AI will have an impact on jobs. But I think it's important to say these historic parallels actually belie something even deeper which are concerns about society safety, concerns about democracy. Senator Josh Hawley was particularly drastic in his descriptions of the depth of his concern.

JOSH HAWLEY: We could be looking at one of the most significant technological innovations in human history. And I think my question is what kind of an innovation is it going to be. Is it going to be like the printing press that diffused knowledge and power and learning widely across the landscape, that empowered ordinary everyday individuals, that led to greater flourishing, that led above all to greater liberty or is it going to be more like the atom bomb?

ALLIE GARFINKLE: The bottom line right now is that in this first hour, the stakes are high, and it's not subtext, it's very actively text. It is very, very clear that they are coming into this with a sense of gravity and a sense for how much AI can really evolve society.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: And, I mean, and it's tough because you have the ethical questions and really trying to regulate something that we just don't know the expanse of at this point. So then, Dan, what are some of the angles that you're looking at?

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, I think one of the things here is the need for regulation versus the need to allow the technology to continue to expand. There's a lot of talk here about how dangerous the technology could be if it's left or if the companies are left to their own devices, if they continue to just push boundaries and don't look at potential safety issues. That includes inherent bias included in some of the data sets that are used to train these technologies, the ability for them to potentially take jobs, the ability for them to be relied upon even though they provide false information.

Those are some of the risks and something that Altman himself, Sam Altman himself over in AI is saying, look, we need regulation, we need guardrails. But at the same time, if the guardrails are too strict, the technology won't be able to kind of prosper and we could end up falling behind in this category. And so this is very different than the discussion we were having last year or two years ago about the metaverse where everybody was saying that that's the next big thing, that's the next big thing.

AI has already been proven as a technology to push the boundaries of what companies are capable of, provide us with new real useful functionality for the things we do every day. I mean, open up any app on your phone and it's using AI. So the idea that it could be kind of corralled and kind of regulated to the point where it's not able to evolve further is also a real threat, especially when it comes to the geopolitical tensions going on between the US and China. They're the two you know superpowers that are really trying to one up each other now in the space.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: I mean, this is going to be a tough fight indeed and really tough to navigate. Like trying to regulate the entire internet as it's just rapidly evolving. A big thank you to our very own Dan Howley and Allie Garfinkle. Thank you both.