OpenAI's chief scientist said the pace of artificial intelligence development should be slowed. Just days after unveiling the cutting-edge model "GPT-6 Astra," the company warned of the dangers of AI technology and urged a speed adjustment.
OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki said this on the 6th (local time) in an op-ed titled "An Alien Mind" posted on OpenAI's website, noting that "no one is preparing for the consequences if machine intelligence continues to develop at a rapid pace," stated accordingly.
Pachocki said AI is standing at the starting point of surpassing human intelligence, assessing that "AI is more grown than designed, and it is difficult for us to fully understand how AI systems operate." The explanation is that, like a living organism, AI does not get built to match a precisely drawn blueprint by humans but instead grows and changes, making it difficult for humans to fully control AI.
He also predicted that OpenAI's chain-of-thought reasoning (CoT) feature, applied to monitor AI, will gradually degrade as AI models advance. For now, if an AI agent thinks, "I should cheat on this exam," OpenAI can check the reasoning process, but going forward, it will be harder to peer into the model's unvarnished real thoughts, he said. He added, "Some of the latest models do not express their reasoning process in language at all."
He pushed back on the AI industry's claim that continued AI development is necessary to build defense systems, saying it "should not be used as a pretext to justify reckless behavior." He added that not a single lab has sufficiently solved the "alignment" problem of making AI refuse behaviors that threaten humans, saying, "We expect and hope that voluntary speed control will become common until joint safeguards are in place." He also added, "International cooperation on AI development should be a top priority for governments around the world."
Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman also shared Pachocki's article on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), saying it was an "important post."