Altman in Abu Dhabi: Humans stay in charge of AI, no debate

Sam Altman wants one thing settled before the world hands anything else over to machines. Speaking at the opening of Adipec in Abu Dhabi on Monday, the OpenAI chief executive told The National's Editor-in-Chief Mina Al-Oraibi that people must stay at the wheel of artificial intelligence. In his words, there is plenty left worth arguing about, but this isn't one of them.

He drew a line firmly on the sand: the technology should be a tool built for people and made to serve them, not the reverse. Altman said he couldn't believe that stance sets OpenAI apart from its rivals, but argued it does, and that his company intends to fight for it. He added that he wished the point didn't need making at all.

The remarks landed days after OpenAI locked in a bundle of agreements with Abu Dhabi spanning energy, education, investment and government. Among them is a tie-up with Adnoc and Abu Dhabi tech group G42 to throw OpenAI's most advanced models at the energy industry's toughest problems.

Altman's pitch was that AI has crossed a threshold. At the start of the year it lagged the world's sharpest scientists, he said, and now it mostly outruns them, handling large slices of white-collar work along the way. He expects society to come through it fine, but warned the industry still has to prove it can stop serious safety and alignment failures from happening.

Asked to name his toughest challenge right now, he answered with a single word: energy. Per-query power use has plunged, yet demand keeps surging. Six years ago OpenAI's heaviest internal user burned through about 100,000 tokens a month; today that's roughly the global per-capita figure, while the top user gets through around 500 billion, he said. Atoms are still atoms, so costs can fall in almost every other way, and power remains the dominant factor in how much AI the planet can run. He hopes AI ends up a net gain for energy availability.

Altman also claimed OpenAI has cracked one of the Millennium Prize problems, saying the work used 10,000 agents running an upcoming GPT model in a flat, hierarchy-free setup for about four days. The claim could not be immediately verified independently. He closed with praise for the UAE as the most forward-looking country on AI adoption, noting about 80 per cent of its young people use ChatGPT.