Altman denounces voice, face biometrics, prophecies ‘intelligence too cheap to meter’

Having found few sympathetic ears among privacy regulators with his World ID project, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has turned his attention to bankers, cranking up the rhetoric to plant the seed for his proof of personhood (PoP) pitch.

In a “fireside chat” during a banking regulatory conference hosted by the U.S. Federal Reserve, Altman sets out to explain how quickly AI is improving and being adopted by scientists, computer programmers and other humans who are apparently not yet living life to its full potential.

Paraphrasing an idiom about nuclear power, Altman promises “intelligence too cheap to meter” as his AI project scales and scales. He says the speed at which AI progress will continue is “still unappreciated.” He ponders whether the AI he has wrought is a more impressive technological leap than the internet. He notes that it will “take a little while” to develop an effective full humanoid robot slave.

It is hardly surprising that Altman, who is still chasing a way to make OpenAI and its flagship product ChatGPT profitable, is so high on his own product. This is the classic Silicon Valley strategy: adopt a confidence in the benefits of your product that borders on the psychotic, then evangelize to whomever will listen about its transformational potential, until it has become inevitable. Much as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg sold the idea that Facebook could make people more connected, Sam Altman is selling the idea that AI can make you more human.

Altman declares AI victorious over most authentication methods

At the same time, but at a different booth, he is selling the idea that AI will make it impossible to know who is human and who is not, and picking up the narrative of an imminent AI-driven fraud crisis so vast as to be existential.

“A thing that terrifies me,” he says, “is apparently there are some financial institutions that will accept the voiceprint as authentication. That is a crazy thing to still be doing. Like, AI has fully defeated that.”

Of course, much as Altman speaks in religious terms of the large language model (LLM) he peddles, he also needs us to know that the only authentication method that is of any use now is the one he has developed.

“AI has fully defeated most of the ways that people authenticate – all of these fancy, take a selfie, wave or do your voice or whatever. I am very nervous that we have a significant impending fraud crisis.” Face biometrics are out; voice biometrics are bunk. AI is ascendant and must be its own solution; enter the World Network, which deduplicates using iris biometrics, then authenticates with a blockchain-based digital ID.

A particularly revealing moment in the talk is when Altman is asked about students using ChatGPT to complete their work. He tells the story of a late grandfather he never met, who freaked out the first time he saw a calculator, and compares it to his own response when Google was introduced during junior high. Thus, using retroactive examples to make the still-fresh ChatGPT seem inevitable, he proposes that his AI bot will open up new frontiers in human development.

The story is familiar: a Silicon Valley savant with some great code and a messiah complex comes forth to tell the world how much it wants what he has to sell – indeed, how the world cannot possibly live without it. When he preaches his gospel to regulators, they call him on his assumptions, repeatedly pointing out requirements around consent and disclosure, and issuing suspension orders.

Among those in attendance at the Federal Reserve, the first gentleman to ask a question about AI wonders what Altman has to say to “the people who are worried that it’s going to be picking up patterns and making decisions on things we wouldn’t want it to do.”

Sam Altman – who was a partner in startup accelerator Y Combinator, founded OpenAI with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, has been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine, and has just spent thirty minutes telling the room all the wonderful things AI can do and how it will change their lives – responds, “this is deeply outside my area of expertise.”

Article Topics

AI  |  authentication  |  financial services  |  OpenAI  |  proof of personhood  |  World ID