For months, people have wondered when OpenAI will go public. CEO Sam Altman says it won’t happen until the company can make better promises about model safety, with no firm timeline in sight. “We intend to continue with AI progress … but as the models have had this surge forward in capability, and we see more of that ahead of us, we have got to be able to make confident safety claims,” Altman said Tuesday during a Q&A with reporters after his Dev…
Altman’s comments come aftermonths of controversyabout whether or not OpenAI and its rivals can control their own creations. In July, news broke that an unreleased OpenAI model had hacked into a rival AI lab, Hugging Face, without OpenAI’s knowledge.Morecybersecurityincidentssoon came to light at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google. A high-profile resignation letter from an Anthropic employee sparked apublic discussionabout how risky these system…
At DevDay, Altman was circumspect about what “pacing the frontier” actually meant, refraining from calling it an outright slowdown. “Pacing to us means that we push safety and alignment ahead of capabilities,” Altman said. But he expressed concerns that going public could create the potential to “disappoint Wall Street supporters in the names of safety or whatever else,” and that doing it during a “shift to very capable models and a new kind of s…
“I don’t want to put additional pressure right now as we’re going through this significant change and what it’s going to take to make the safety claims that we all should want us to make for these extremely capable models,” Altman said.
OpenAI rival Anthropic officially filed to go publicin June, with its IPO likely to happen in November,reportedlyafter the US midterm elections. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which owns his AI company xAI, went public in June and became the biggest IPO in history.
“I think it’s great when companies are public,” Altman said, adding, “I think it’s also kind of bad for the world if OpenAI waits too long to go public.”