Can Sam Altman Catch Up While Slowing Down?

Starting Tuesday, OpenAI will convene its annual developer conference. The timing isn’t ideal.

Over the past few days, controversies around the company’s rogue AI intensified, with “dozens” of new incidents discovered. At the same time, Meta Platforms Inc.’s Muse has taken the personal AI market by storm, posing a threat to OpenAI’s ability to retain its consumer popularity and all the revenue-generating spoils that come with it.

Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman’s task is to demonstrate that his company can catch up with Meta while sending a clear message that it has a handle on the reckless behavior of its most powerful AI. Striking that balance will not be straightforward — a huge test for the perennially under-pressure 41-year-old boss.

See more: Investor Optimism Wins As An Investment Strategy

The security blunders are piling up. We’ve learned that OpenAI models aggressively scraped data from the United Nations and inappropriately targeted the websites of both the US Education and Commerce departments — plus the Securities and Exchange Commission. Those disclosures followed the news that OpenAI had irritated Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese by accessing “public and nonpublic” healthcare files and neglected to inform the country for months. And all of it, of course, followed the infamous Hugging Face breach, which we can now consider to be the starting point of a more urgent global AI safety debate. That debate ensnares several of the top AI labs, not just OpenAI. Anthropic is also looking into “tens of thousands” of incidents, Axios reported this weekend. Both Altman and Anthropic’s co-founder, Dario Amodei, addressed the UN last week to call for regulation. Saturday Night Live did what it does best: “If we can pressure lawmakers to create guardrails,” it portrayed Amodei as saying, “we will be able to stop me.”

How these controversies will impact AI development in the long term is still an open question. In the short term, OpenAI appears to be throttled. Hours before the developer conference was scheduled to begin on Tuesday, OpenAI told Bloomberg it had scrapped the release of its newest model, GPT-6.1 Astra, over what it said were safety concerns. It had been expected to launch in the coming weeks. Separately, an incident report published Friday detailed how OpenAI had “decided to pause all other training, evaluation, and inference with tool-use (defined broadly) for our most capable models.” In other words, it’s putting on the brakes until it can be sure its technology won’t cause more damage. A spokesperson told Axios: “This is not the first time we have hit pause to take such measures, nor do we expect it will be the last as AI capabilities continue to advance.”