(image Matt Weinberger, Business Insider)

Sam Altman, head of Y Combinator, gave an interview with Mike Curtis at Airbnb’s Open Air 2015 conference and brought up (among other issues) his concerns about AI value alignment. He didn’t pull any punches:

(from the Business Insider article)

“On the growing artificial-intelligence market: “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.”

On what Altman would do if he were President Obama: “If I were Barack Obama, I would commit maybe $100 billion to R&D of AI safety initiatives.” Altman shared that he recently invested in a company doing “AI safety research” to investigate the potential risks of artificial intelligence.”

$100 billion would be four orders of magnitude larger than FLI’s research grant program. If FLI were a PAC, it might be time for us to run Altman-for-president ads…