Sam Altman says AI can improve government service and deserves backing

Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, during a fireside chat at University College London (UCL) in London, UK, on Wednesday, May 24, 2023. Altman said part of the reason for his current tour of European cities is to discover a suitable location for a new office.

Countries such as India should back research on artificial intelligence in ways that can improve government services like health care, OpenAI Inc. Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said.

“Some nationally funded AI effort feels like a good idea,” Altman said Wednesday at a New Delhi event host by India’s Economic Times newspaper.

India is the latest stop for Altman on his world tour, and he is scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other government officials. He will be in South Korea on June 9.

“The main thing that I think is important is figuring out how to integrate these technologies into other services,” Altman said. “And that is an area that I think governments are behind on, and don’t have the answers yet.”

India, which currently holds the presidency of the group of industrialized and emerging economies known as the G20, can play a major role in shaping global AI regulations, Altman said. He has previously called for more regulations and said his “greatest fear” is that the technology would cause significant harm.

Building local-language capabilities is important for OpenAI, Altman said.

“We had a big step forward from GPT 3.5 to 4 at non-English languages, so GPT 4 is pretty good at say the top 20 languages and OK at maybe the top 100,” he said. “We will be able to push this much further.”

OpenAI is focused on building a better, faster and cheaper model of its generative AI ChatGPT product, Altman has said previously. The product made AI a buzzword and kicked off a global race among tech companies to build their own versions of the chatbot technology.

For instance, Alphabet Inc.’s Google is rolling out new AI tools to help marketers create advertisements, seeking to capitalize on growing business demand for the emerging technology.

In the key growth market of India, Google has been developing an AI model that would be able to handle more than 100 Indian languages across speech and text, a drive that would widen internet access beyond the country’s urban English-speaking minority.