Tech guru behind ChatGPT 'a little bit scared' of his creation: 'Going to eliminate a lot of current jobs'

The CEO of the company behind ChatGPT, likely the world’s most famous AI chatbot, admitted that he was "a little bit scared" of his company’s creation during an interview with ABC News. 

"We've got to be careful here," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said during an interview Thursday. 

That’s because the technology itself, he explained, was extremely powerful and could be dangerous.

"I think people should be happy that we are a little bit scared of this," the 37-year-old tech guru said. 

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When pressed about why he was "scared" of his company’s creation, Altman argued that if he wasn’t "scared" then "you should either not trust me or be very unhappy that I’m in this job." 

He continued: "It is going to eliminate a lot of current jobs, that’s true. We can make much better ones. The reason to develop AI at all, in terms of impact on our lives and improving our lives and upside, this will be the greatest technology humanity has yet developed." 

Altman also spoke on the impacts that AI-powered chatbots would have on education and whether it would "increase laziness among students." 

"Education is going to have to change," the OpenAI CEO said. "But it’s happened many other times with technology. When we got the calculator, the way we taught math and what we tested students on totally changed."

VIRGINIA GOV. YOUNGKIN SAYS MORE SCHOOLS SHOULD BAN CHATGPT

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced in March that more school districts should ban AI technologies like ChatGPT. 

Youngkin said that the goal of education was "to make sure that our kids can think and, therefore, if a machine is thinking for them, then we’re not accomplishing our goal."

But Altman was adamant that ChatGPT would be a net boon for society. 

"The promise of this technology, one of the ones that I'm most excited about is the ability to provide individual learning — great individual learning for each student."

And those benefits would not just extend to education, Altman claimed. 

"We can have that for every profession, and we can have a much higher quality of life, like standard of living," Altman reportedly said. "But we can also have new things we can't even imagine today — so that's the promise."

But ChatGPT has another more worrying potential, according to Altman, who warned, "We do worry a lot about authoritarian governments developing this and using this." 

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ChatGPT recently released an updated version of its technology, ChatGPT-4, on Tuesday. One change is that ChatGPT-4 can interpret images and even create recipe lists out of items in a user's fridge, according ABC News. 

Fox News’ Julia Musto contributed to this report.