GoKawiilSarah Friar, Chief Financial Officer of OpenAI, speaks during the Reuters NEXT conference, in New York City, U.S., Dec. 10, 2024.
In the days since, concerns around AI's ability to harm have reached a fever pitch in and out of Washington, with Anthropic chief Dario Amodei, SpaceX Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman agreeing with calls for an industry-wide slowdown.
Friar's comments come as the debate about the safety of AI has exploded over the last week, sparked by a former Anthropic researcher who quit his job and warned that the rapidly-evolving technology could "kill us all by the end of the decade."
OpenAI will decide on investments based on a "strong ROI," even if the technology's development has to be paced, she added.
"Even if we stop today, the amount of intelligence that's available in the world is massive," Friar said.
On Saturday, Amodei penned a blog post that argued for slower development of AI models to "reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong."
Friar said she wasn't worried about the possibility of AI agents using weapons of mass destruction to kill, but said, "We do need to take safety seriously."
"And if it means we have to pace the frontier and slow down, absolutely, we're going to listen to our researchers and do that," she said.
"As the CFO, I need to then make business decisions around it," she added. "We're pacing that frontier and taking that safety and alignment really seriously."
While the AI labs have found some common ground on their safety pronouncements, views outside the industry differ wildly.
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