ABU DHABI (The Thursday Times) — Artificial intelligence has gone from trailing the world’s best scientists at the start of this year to mostly outperforming them, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman told the opening of the ADIPEC energy conference on Monday, while insisting there must be “no room for debate” that people stay in control.
“AI was mostly not as smart as our smartest scientists, and now it’s mostly smarter than them,” Altman said on stage in Abu Dhabi, adding that the technology could now do “a lot of parts” of many white-collar jobs.
He said there “should not be a handoff to AI” and that it “needs to be a tool built for people and needs to serve people, not the other way around”.
“There are a lot of other things we can debate, but on this one, we think there must be no room for debate,” he said. “I can’t believe that this differentiates us from other AI companies, but it does. This is a value that we intend to really go fight for. And I wish it didn’t need to be said.”
Altman said he believed society would “navigate through this all fine”, but that the industry would have to show it could prevent harm as its systems grew more capable. “How do we guarantee, and how do we give the world comfort with that guarantee, that we are going to avoid serious safety and alignment incidents?” he asked. “I think that’ll be increasingly important for our industry to demonstrate.”
One word: energy
Asked in a quick-fire round to name the challenge he faces today, Altman gave a one-word answer to a hall of oil executives and energy ministers: “Energy.”
“We’re going to make more efficient models — we’re going to have robots that can make chip fabs more efficient and assemble racks for us,” he said. “We can bring down the cost of delivering great AI in almost every way, except, you know, atoms are still atoms.”
He called power “the very dominant factor” in how much AI the world can use. The energy needed for each query has fallen sharply, he said, but demand keeps climbing: six years ago OpenAI’s heaviest internal user consumed about 100,000 tokens a month, and the top user now consumes about 500 billion. He said he hoped AI would deliver “a net gain for energy availability in the world”.
The ADNOC deal
Altman’s appearance followed a partnership between ADNOC, OpenAI and Abu Dhabi technology group G42, signed in the presence of Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. ADNOC said it would become the first energy company in the world to deploy OpenAI’s frontier technology.
The company said the system would run on OpenAI’s GPT models using infrastructure inside the UAE, and would be used for field planning and for connecting operational, capital and commercial decisions, with its own experts retaining “oversight of consequential decisions”. OpenAI also partnered with Mubadala and Inception42 on investment analysis, and launched a “Machine-Readable Government” initiative with the Department of Government Enablement.
“Sam, from the moment ChatGPT was born, the world has asked what energy can do for AI,” ADNOC chief executive and UAE industry minister Sultan Al Jaber said in his opening address. “And now, together, we will find out what AI can do for energy.”
“AI must be built in, not bolted on,” he said. “In a crisis, the speed of insight and the speed of decision-making is the difference between continuity and disruption.”
Altman, for his part, called the UAE “consistently the most forward-looking country in the world for AI adoption” and said about 80 per cent of its young people were using ChatGPT. OpenAI was reported last month to be in talks with UAE-based funds, including Abu Dhabi’s MGX, to help anchor a $30 billion funding round.
A disputed maths claim
Altman also repeated OpenAI’s claim to have solved one of the Millennium Prize problems, the celebrated set of unsolved mathematics questions, saying the work used 10,000 agents running an upcoming GPT model for about four days. OpenAI first made the claim in September over the Navier-Stokes equations. It has since been caught up in a dispute among mathematicians over credit, and the Clay Mathematics Institute, which awards the prizes, has not recognised any solution.
ADIPEC, which runs until 5 November, is expected to draw more than 40 ministers and 2,260 exhibiting companies, though ExxonMobil and Chevron have pulled senior executives from the event over security concerns, sources said, as tensions between the United States and Iran persist.
