OpenAI's Altman Says the Use of AI is 'Non-Negotiable' (cnbc.com)
- Reference: 0185378768
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/09/02/1957204/openais-altman-says-the-use-of-ai-is-non-negotiable
- Source link: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/02/g20-innovation-ministerial-live-updates.html
> Altman thinks the public won't be talking as much about AI a decade from now -- it'll be expected everywhere. "A kid growing up today will never be smarter than AI, but he or she will also never have understood a world where every product and service that they interact with is not really smart and really capable and really helpful," he said.
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> Altman referenced the adoption of electricity multiple times in his comments and drew a line between that and AI. "I think it would be approximately as bad of an idea to say we're not going to have AI in our country as it was to say we're not going to have electricity in our country, you know, back 100 plus years ago," he said.
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> Altman called cybersecurity one of the biggest challenges to navigate in the age of AI and one that leaders shouldn't sidestep. "I think some things are going to go very wrong with cybersecurity unless people act quite urgently," he said. Altman said that falling short in cyber defense and other areas "could set this technology back a great deal."
You can watch a recording of the chat [2]on YouTube .
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/02/g20-innovation-ministerial-live-updates.html
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4QIZ_7Rdxg
Same Altman: Snake Oil Salesman (Score:2)
A snake oil salesman informs us all that ignoring his snake oil is the wrong move. Shocking. I mean, I'm really surprised by this turn of events.
In all sincerity, the vision of AI as something people appreciate *COULD* be achieved, if they spent as much time trying to make it something people would enjoy using, rather than having it shoved at us from every direction while it's half-baked and spewing confident nonsense at us more often than not.
Re:Same Altman: Snake Oil Salesman (Score:4, Insightful)
There will always be improvements, but AI is fundamentally more sociopathic than the worst human on the planet. That will not change because sociopaths control it.
Will AI be "worth the price" when deaths are part of the price? It's coming.
Re: (Score:2)
You remember that old "AI-targeted bombs, missiles and drones" thing?
That's us, it is.
These people think technology can make them gods, and they don't plan to keep us around.
Re: (Score:2)
> You remember that old "AI-targeted bombs, missiles and drones" thing?
> That's us, it is.
> These people think technology can make them gods, and they don't plan to keep us around.
Ultimately, I think that's the thing they don't realize we see. They spent a decade telling C-suite folks that they can run their businesses without employees if they just invest heavily in AI, and now, when people are starting to push back, hard in some cases, the salesfolks, the evangelicals, or as I used to call them, the AI prophets, like Altman, are ramping up the prophecies to hysteric levels. Embrace us or face apocalypse doesn't exactly hit solidly when the message so far has also been that there's
Re: (Score:2)
Death is something we expect based on the utility something provides. We don't accept death from a baby's toy laced with asbestos because there's very very limited utility, it's easily substituted with anything else.
On the flip side we very much do accept an insanely high fatality rate for the use of motor vehicles, as the utility they provide in terms of mobility is fundamental to our society.
I suspect we'll tolerate a significant amount of death in the name of AI, god knows we accept it for social media a
"Non-negotiable" (Score:2)
Man knows he's cooked after pissing away billions on a hepped-up ELIZA that nobody but him and a handful of morons at hn want.
Re: (Score:2)
ETAOIN SHRDLU
For countries? (Score:3)
How does a country even use AI? People use AI and where that AI is largely doesn't matter.
I'm personal not interested in AI which is a subscription. For me it needs to be local and running on my own hardware, which is not what Altman and co wants.
Re: (Score:2)
> How does a country even use AI? People use AI
It's almost like countries have governments which are made up of people. Well mostly. I'm not sure there's any real people in the White House, but most other countries have their governments staffed by people.
It's part of the future (Score:3)
But you're probably not in this future.
Just focusing on brute forcing with bigger and bigger and bigger datacenters will just lead china to invest 1/100 of the budget in people actually researching and winning the "AI race" not by having the best model, but the best use for it.
1/10 of the money being used to make more data centers or to strip books for some extra scrap of data, invested in people coming up with ideas would help a lot more.
Re: (Score:2)
The best models will look nothing like the models of today, how long that takes is hard to predict. AI companies are in a race to grab as much wealth as they can, not to finish developing AIs that are useful and responsible. "Responsibility" as applied to AI is responsibility to investors.
Re: (Score:1)
There seems to be a tendency to conflate AI with LLMs. LLM development, which seems to be the direction for most of the industry, is consuming obscene amounts of money. Trying to build "better" LLMs results in models that consume their own output. This results in Hapsburg Syndrome with increasing hallucination and eventual model collapse Other forms of AI development require more human involvement and less silicon.
Decisions... decisions... (Score:1)
Who to believe? Sam "Scam" Altman, the guy that not only has been caught lying a number of times and has 100% interest in the matter at hand, or the band of experts that can't stop warning about the bad and even catastrophic effects of AI on everything from society to the environment?
Hey Sam (Score:2)
Not everything needs electricity either.
Re: (Score:2)
> Not everything needs electricity either.
Good thing too as, unfortunately, data centers will probably need all the electricity - and water.
In future news: Classes in "How to be Amish" become very popular.
Re: (Score:2)
To be Amish still requires land, there won't be any of that either. Billionaires own everything, your job is to die and there's an AI for that.
Re: (Score:2)
> ... your job is to die and there's an AI for that.
Or at least a booth: [1]Quick and painless or slow and horrible? [youtube.com] :-)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRWKHrdts84
Know what else is 'non-negotiable'? (Score:1, Insightful)
a #bulletThroughTheHead of Sam Altman.
What a fucking arrogant prick.
AI is mandatory, vaccines are optional (Score:2)
One is pure hype and the other is pure science.
We're screwed.
Re: (Score:1)
It's good that vaccines are optional because they're not always made by those who have your best interests in mind. They see you as less than human, and are just as psychopathic as Sam Altman, and worse is that this goes into your bloodstream and is not a screen you can turn off and walk away from. If only more people knew how bad things really are.
Re: (Score:2)
Pretty accurate conveyance of what most slashdotters are these days. It's not like it was back in the day...
Re: AI is mandatory, vaccines are optional (Score:2)
Lolol you think smart people talk to you
He is correct. (Score:2)
Altman is correct, we will all be using AI.
But he is also a cunt, so let's hope it's not his AI, but an open system, owned and controlled by everyone.
Re: (Score:2)
Co-ops work well for utilities, what greater utilities for a co-op than AI?
So was the metaverse (Score:2)
The metaverse was touted as inevitable too...
And where is the metaverse now?
Re: (Score:2)
Nobody considered the metaverse inevitable. That's false equivalency.
The truth is that AI is inseparable from business, at this point. It's just like "cloud": an irritating buzzword with a lot of trumped up buzz, but a meaningful and appreciated advancement which isn't going away.
The neophytes just haven't caught up, yet.
Cybersecurity (Score:2)
Did he mention that one of the most likely causes of cybersecurity issues will be due to AI generated code that some cowboy slapped into a production system. AI might be good enough to replace some code monkey cobbling together bits of JavaScript taken from stack overflow, but it's nowhere near good enough to replace an actual developer and depends heavily on capable developers being able to spot the small flaws in what it does spit out before they cause serious problems.
Re: (Score:2)
So you're acknowledging that cowboys who slap things into a production system are the problem?
Got it.
I take it you haven't used AI at all recently. It's absolutely amazing how many people haven't even got a clue how AI works and give it a false equivalency of a stackoverflow copypasta bot. Sorry, no. It hasn't been that bad for at least a year.
Sure you had to say people a century ago... (Score:2)
... that rejecting electricity was non negotiable. Sure they rejected it like is happening with generative AI on big collectives. Right?
if it is not negotiable... (Score:2)
...then the people should own it. Non-negotiable services are utilities, Sam Altman needs to be cut out of utilities, with prejudice.
Re: (Score:2)
/thread
He forgot to mention (Score:2)
using AI is better than sex!
Helpful? (Score:2)
> "where every product and service that they interact with is not really smart and really capable and really helpful"
Helpful? For whom?
"I see you are running low on ice cream. I've ordered 6 more gallons in your next grocery delivery."
"I see you enjoy looking at porn. I've subscribed you to 6 new porn newsletters."
"I see you read articles about issue X. Since candidate agrees with you are issue X, I've submitted your ballot in favor of that candidate."
In what universe are any of these sorts of actions 'helpful'?
Things that never happened for $100 Alex (Score:2)
One thing that never happened was any country saying they wouldn't adopt electricity.
Some municipalities were slower than others to roll it out, for example many had plumbed gas lines already and the early days of electricity were seen as a luxury when they already invested in lighting, so rather they adopted it eventually but not right away. However it was also at the time proven with a clearly useful application (light) replacing an existing application (gas-powered lanterns) where people already had
Totally unbiased statement (Score:5, Insightful)
"The use of the snake oil I'm selling is non-negotiable" -- Sam Altman
Re: (Score:2)
For real, why is this news, it's a press release. It's like asking the owner of [1]Kunkleman Chevrolet [youtube.com] if we should all buy new cars and which brand is the best.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqNgTvwvaz4
Re: (Score:2)
It's like that "interview" that shill CEO of Flock gave.
That is leading to Flock being banned by a growing number of states, counties and municipalitles.
Re: (Score:2)
We can only hope, but I predict it ain't gonna happen. Sadly.
Currently reading How AI Thinks by Nigel Toon. Some interesting bits and it's going quickly, but not seeing anything much to recommend in it. The intersection of "experts on AI" and "people who write well" remains small, though it may become more difficult to tell if they use AI to help write? I think it's only the deepest experts who can really explain things clearly, whereas AI is mostly focused on sounding deep with hallucinatory seasonings a
Re: (Score:2)
If there's one thing about the new crop of CEO's it's that they all really think they are cooler and more insightful then they actually are.
He may be wealthy beyond my wildest dreams but the best way to convince someone Peter Thiel shouldn't ever be near the levers of state power is to show them an interview with Peter Thiel.
Re: (Score:2)
New crop? CEOs haven't always thought they were cooler/more insifghtful?
Re: (Score:2)
True but I my thinking is the older ones weren't putting themselves out there so much, I think they also knew it better to stay behind the scenes and let your professionals do the talking. Particularly before the 1980s when the CEO wasn't simply the head executive but became a magical person with fairy powers.
Re: (Score:3)
"Rupert Murdoch says watching Fox News is 'Non-Negotiable'"
Do we really need a Slashdot story on every single fucking mention of AI anywhere in the universe?? Nowadays it's less 'news for nerds' and more recycling the same thin talking points so zealots on both sides can just argue as much as possible and inevitably end up insulting rsilvergun along with a history of all their posts.
Re: Totally unbiased statement (Score:2)
This is what happens when crypto bros take something over. Enshittification is fundamentally inevitable.
Re: (Score:2)
Do not use that word, it's just more grift.
Re: Totally unbiased statement (Score:2)
What, crypto? Good point, I should call it cryptocurrency to differentiate
Re: (Score:2)
> Do we really need a Slashdot story on every single fucking mention of AI anywhere in the universe??
Well, it is a welcome change from the [1]constant crypto scam stories [slashdot.org] /. has been pushing, but it is par for the course of /. always pushing whatever scam they've invested in....
[1] https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23522683&cid=64979895
Re: (Score:2)
Oreo maker says eating entire bags of oreos every day is non-negotiable. diabetus be damned
Re: (Score:2)
What's "snake oil" about it? And what kind of people consider this "insightful" and not a troll?
Would you consider a facility producing clean water and power (like a nuclear desalination facility) to be "snake oil"? You know: things which are in high demand and improve the lives of many. No, AI isn't clean water or power (and it does use those things). But it is akin to a revolutionary change, like the steam engine, or the Sterling engine, which completely changed the face of industry in a very short period
Re: Totally unbiased statement (Score:2)
I hope you're wrong because otherwise we're all fucked. Yes, you too, and only a very short time after the rest of us
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe 2 years ago... The other models are catching up. Claude, Grok, Gemini, Deepseek, Perplexity, Meta.ai etc,
ChatGPT could die tomorrow and would anyone care, honestly.
Re: (Score:2)
There's nothing "snake oil" about AI, but equally it is not the second coming of Christ. There is however no doubt that AI is a tool that can be used in useful ways in a variety of situations, and I suspect in this case Altman is right saying every country will adopt its use for something.