Barry Diller says trust in Sam Altman is irrelevant as AGI nears; unknown consequences pose the real concern

At The Wall Street Journal's 'Future of Everything' conference this week, billionaire media mogul Barry Diller defended OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as sincere and 'a decent person with good values,' despite recent accusations of manipulative behavior from former colleagues and board members.

Diller argued that individual trustworthiness matters less than the unknowable effects of AI itself. He stated: 'One of the big issues with AI is it goes way beyond trust. It may be that trust is irrelevant because the things that are happening are a surprise to the people who are making those things happen.'

Diller warned that if humans do not establish guardrails for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI—AI that could outperform humans on any task), 'another force, an AGI force, will do it themselves. And once that happens, once you unleash that, there's no going back.' He noted that 'we're close to it. We're not there yet, but we're getting closer and closer, quicker and quicker.'