"Can't let egos get in the way": Sam Altman indicates pause in OpenAI IPO plans, backs call for increased safeguards in AI development

San Francisco (California) [US], September 13 (ANI): Hours after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei announced a plan to slow down AI development in the face of safety fears, Open AI CEO Sam Altman backed that call and also announced a delay in the much-awaited IPO of his company. 
In an interview with Fortune Magazine Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell., Altman said, “I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don’t feel pressure on that.”
Altman in his interview agreed that the AI industry still has a long way to go when it comes to addressing safety concerns and fears of losing control of AI systems. Altman told Fortune that plans for an IPO could well be delayed beyond this year. 
“I would say not 2026. We got a lot of stuff to do, like meeting this moment of what is going to be required for safety and alignment, and how the industry and governments can work together,” he said.
Altman told Fortune Friday that the stakes were high enough that the industry needs to find a way to come together. “We all have a tremendous amount of responsibility, and cannot let egos or incentives for profit or anything else get in the way,” he said.
“I don’t think we’re currently at a place where we could say, you know, push much further on capabilities without making more progress on monitorability, alignment, the ability to understand what a model is doing, and the ability to make sure that a model will follow human values and the intent of its users,” Altman added in his interview to Fortune.
Earlier, Dario Amodei had made a reference to an incident at OpenAI-Hugging Face where a swarm of agents staged cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack. Amodei said that such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet.
Amodei then proposed a three-step plan for pacing the frontier and building AI at a balanced rate that aims to ensure its safety. These include; each frontier AI company committing to giving ongoing, employee-like access to a team of embedded third-party evaluators, coordination to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress and global coordination. Amodei also calls for the US and other democratic governments to coordinate with authoritarian governments, while taking seriously the challenges of verifying compliance.
Speaking to Fortune, Altman stressed that Open AI was committed to safety of AI models as work was needed on hugely powerful systems. 
Altman had earlier backed the public call made by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to slow the pace of AI Development or risk losing control.
In a post on X, Altman said, "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same."
The call for slowing down AI development comes after Jacob Coxon a researcher associated with Anthropic publically announced he was quitting the industry allegedly over fears that the company and its competitors were 'racing to build systems they won’t be able to control. (ANI)