🤖 The charm of Sam Altman and why AI will save the world

Good morning and welcome to the latest issue of neonpulse!

Here are the AI headlines making waves:

🌊  The charm of Sam Altman

🌊  Why AI will save the world

Let’s get into it!

The Charm of Sam Altman

No company wants restrictive regulations forced onto their industry.

From tobacco to oil to big pharma, businesses spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on lobbying in order to minimize the laws governing their industry…

Yet OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has taken a different approach.

Rather than hiding behind an army of lobbyists, Altman has taken unusually active role by engaging directly with lawmakers and regulators in order to help them understand the new technology.

Altman's approach marks a significant departure from the past (where tech executives traditionally avoided government scrutiny until forced to testify) with Altman seeking out meetings with lawmakers and testifying before Congress in order to help ease regulators concerns.

By actively participating in the regulatory process (and by offering proposals for A.I. governance) Altman hopes to avoid the pitfalls that befell social media companies, where their lack of cooperation enraged U.S. lawmakers, leading to a less-than-friendly dynamic.

In an effort to be as helpful as possible, Altman has embarked on a world tour, meeting with leaders around the globe and discussing the need for regulatory intervention in order to mitigate the potential risks associated with powerful A.I. models.

So while other tech giants and start-ups have differing views on government interference, Altman's charm offensive has earned him respect among lawmakers, allowing him to influence and shape the direction of future regulations.

And while Altman's efforts have been largely successful, some lawmakers remain cautious about becoming overly reliant on tech leaders for education on A.I. technologies, with a number of regulators raising concerns about the undue influence and the potential benefits Altman’s proposals may have for established A.I. companies.

So is Sam Altman is really the most helpful tech CEO in the world?

Or simply the most cunning?

AI To The Rescue

While there are no shortage of concerns about the dangers of AI, Silicon Valley luminary Marc Andreessen believes that worries over the new tech are completely overblown.

Instead of focusing on “doom and gloom scenarios” Andreessen wants us to focus on the ways that AI will dramatically improve our lives, and in order to help spread his optimistic mindset, he’s released a blog post running though all of the ways that AI will improve our lives.

According to Andreessen, here are a few of the ways that AI will change the world for the better:

• Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful. The AI tutor will be by each child’s side every step of their development, helping them maximize their potential with the machine version of infinite love.

• Every person will have an AI assistant/coach/mentor/trainer/advisor/therapist that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, and infinitely helpful. The AI assistant will be present through all of life’s opportunities and challenges, maximizing every person’s outcomes.

• Every scientist will have an AI assistant/collaborator/partner that will greatly expand their scope of scientific research and achievement. Every artist, every engineer, every businessperson, every doctor, every caregiver will have the same in their worlds.

• Every leader of people – CEO, government official, nonprofit president, athletic coach, teacher – will have the same. The magnification effects of better decisions by leaders across the people they lead are enormous, so this intelligence augmentation may be the most important of all.

• Productivity growth throughout the economy will accelerate dramatically, driving economic growth, creation of new industries, creation of new jobs, and wage growth, and resulting in a new era of heightened material prosperity across the planet.

• Scientific breakthroughs and new technologies and medicines will dramatically expand, as AI helps us further decode the laws of nature and harvest them for our benefit.

• The creative arts will enter a golden age, as AI-augmented artists, musicians, writers, and filmmakers gain the ability to realize their visions far faster and at greater scale than ever before.

• I even think AI is going to improve warfare, when it has to happen, by reducing wartime death rates dramatically. Every war is characterized by terrible decisions made under intense pressure and with sharply limited information by very limited human leaders. Now, military commanders and political leaders will have AI advisors that will help them make much better strategic and tactical decisions, minimizing risk, error, and unnecessary bloodshed.

• In short, anything that people do with their natural intelligence today can be done much better with AI, and we will be able to take on new challenges that have been impossible to tackle without AI, from curing all diseases to achieving interstellar travel.

• And this isn’t just about intelligence! Perhaps the most underestimated quality of AI is how humanizing it can be. AI art gives people who otherwise lack technical skills the freedom to create and share their artistic ideas. Talking to an empathetic AI friend really does improve their ability to handle adversity. And AI medical chatbots are already more empathetic than their human counterparts. Rather than making the world harsher and more mechanistic, infinitely patient and sympathetic AI will make the world warmer and nicer.

So while there are legitimate and serious threats posed by AI, it does look (at least in Andreessen’s eyes) like the benefits of the new technology far outweigh the risks.

According to Andreessen, “The development and proliferation of AI – far from a risk that we should fear – is a moral obligation that we have to ourselves, to our children, and to our future. We should be living in a much better world with AI, and now we can.”

You can check out the full blog post here.

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And now your moment of zen

That’s all for today folks! We hope you enjoyed today’s newsletter, and we’ll see you bright and early tomorrow!