More than 130 world leaders descended on the United Nations headquarters in New York this week, joining the pageantry and speechmaking of the annual general assembly. Many of the visiting presidents and prime ministers delivered their set-piece addresses to a sparsely populated hall, but contributions from two unlikely visitors in the nearby security council chamber stood out. OpenAI boss Sam Altman and Dario Amodei of Anthropic gave briefings on the safety of artificial intelligence on Wednesday, as a nervous world watched on.
Speaking in the room where some of the biggest questions to face humanity have been deliberated on since the end of the second world war, Altman said the world faced a choice. AI could be like a renaissance of creativity and discovery, he said, or more like a new Industrial Revolution bringing upheaval and disarray. They must be shaped through democratic processes and by governments accountable to the people that they serve,” Altman said.
The words rang hollow less than 24 hours later, when Altman was the subject of an angry phone call from Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, after revelations a rogue OpenAI agent had hacked into sensitive Medicare systems in Australia. Altman and his colleagues had kept the incident secret for two months. As people become more anxious about the risk posed by AI to civilisation, Albanese grasped the company’s transgression as proof that democratically elected governments need to impose guardrails on the technology.
Already, many believe the risk of AI slipping out of human control is a threat akin to the Covid-19 pandemic or a nuclear arms race. Like his government’s moves to ban children under 16 from using social media, and forcing platforms to give users the ability to opt out of powerful algorithms, Albanese wants to use new AI laws as a way to curb the creeping sense of helplessness so many people feel in the face of big tech. But Thursday’s announcement that government websites had been compromised by OpenAI showed that serious vulnerabilities and failures of process exist within both the company and the federal government.
The hack happened in June, but it took OpenAI executives until September to alert Services Australia that statistical data on Medicare use had been accessed. Despite the company’s corporate might – and an army of well-paid government relations executives and lobbyists – OpenAI deemed it appropriate to send an email to a public-facing Australian government address to raise the alarm, months after the hack. It’s incredible the email wasn’t mistaken for spam.
Wholly inadequate to the point of recklessness, the company’s actions show contempt for the Australian government and its citizens, whose healthcare data had been stolen. Worse, Altman met with Australia’s defence minister, Richard Marles, in early September but did not tell him about the hack. It took time for the public service to react to OpenAI’s email.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
