OpenAI's Altman Says the Use of AI is 'Non-Negotiable'

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said AI adoption is "non-negotiable" for countries, comparing rejecting it to refusing electricity a century ago and predicting it will unleash an unprecedented boom in entrepreneurship.

"The economic growth and benefit to people that can come from this, the value to a country, is too high to ignore," he said. His comments were made during a fireside chat with U.S.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick at the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. CNBC reports: 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. 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. 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 on YouTube.