OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
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Sam Altman says the Hugging Face hack was a stark reminder of why concentrating AI power in the hands of a few people or companies is a bad idea.In a Monday appearance on Y Combinator's podcast, Altman told YC CEO Garry Tan that anyone who was not a little scared of or humbled by the Hugging Face breach "is not taking this seriously enough."Last week, one of OpenAI's models broke out of its sandbox, hacked into open-source platform Hugging Face's systems, and accessed its internal datasets.Altman acknowledged that OpenAI made mistakes but said the Hugging Face hack also showed how "incredibly capable" AI systems have become.Altman called the incident "a real reminder of the stakes of what's happening," adding that "loss of control accidents are not entirely theoretical things."Altman also said that, much like dystopian sci-fi stories, it would be "terrible" for "one company or person or model having more power than everybody or everything else on earth put together."That means no one should be locked into a single AI or a single company's "moral worldview," nor should the economic wealth from AI be concentrated in a single firm. Altman said the Hugging Face incident showed why AI capabilities should be spread more broadly, saying that would raise the overall "safety bar" by enabling more people to build defensive systems.
