Chris Lehane, OpenAI's chief global affairs officer, fears the rising risk of unpopular AI and told us the solution might be a reorg of government and business. He offered two megapoints in a conversation Tuesday at OpenAI's new office in Washington:
- The AI companies and government are so interdependent — the companies need light regs, contracts; government needs AI systems — that it might require a new public-private hybrid to manage them.
- The AI companies could get crushed by bad politics if they don't find ways to share any wealth they create, much like Alaska shares oil & gas revenue with its residents. "People need to feel like they're gonna have a piece of this and participate in it," Lehane said. "You can't talk beyond people or above people. You need to talk with people and involve them in the conversation."
More broadly, Lehane says we're entering a new chapter of AI, where it becomes an "infrastructure technology … a utility for intelligence."
- With electricity, he said, "people began to understand that if I could plug something in and build something off of that, I could do incredible things."
- He said OpenAI aims to build "an intelligence that's accessible, that's cheap and that's abundant. So that as many people as possible — not just the few, but the many — can actually build things off of this."
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