Is ChatGPT a ‘virus that has been launched into the wild’? More than three years ago, this editor sat down with Sam Altman for a small occasion in San Francisco quickly after he’d left his role as the president of Y Combinator to develop into CEO of the AI company he co-based in 2015 with Elon Musk and others, OpenAI. On the time, Altman described OpenAI’s potential in language that sounded outlandish to some. Altman said, for example, that the chance with synthetic common intelligence - machine intelligence that may resolve issues in addition to a human - is so nice that if OpenAI managed to crack it, the outfit may “maybe seize the sunshine cone of all future value in the universe.” He stated that the company was “going to need to not release research” as a result of it was so highly effective. The viewers laughed at various points of the conversation, not sure how severely to take Altman. No one is laughing now, nevertheless.