AI will be fine regardless of who wins White House

DAVOS, Switzerland — OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman said generative artificial intelligence as a sector, and the U.S. as a country are both “going to be fine” no matter who wins the presidential election later this year.

Altman was responding to a question on Donald Trump’s resounding victory at the Iowa caucus and the public being “confronted with the reality of this upcoming election.”

“I believe that America is gonna be fine, no matter what happens in this election. I believe that AI is going to be fine, no matter what happens in this election, and we will have to work very hard to make it so,” Altman said this week in Davos during a Bloomberg House interview at the World Economic Forum.

Trump won the Iowa Republican caucus in a landslide on Monday, setting a new record for the Iowa race with a 30-point lead over his closest rival.

“I think part of the problem is we’re saying, ‘We’re now confronted, you know, it never occurred to us that the things he’s saying might be resonating with a lot of people and now, all of a sudden, after his performance in Iowa, oh man.’ That’s a very like Davos thing to do,” Altman said.

“I think there has been a real failure to sort of learn lessons about what’s kind of like working for the citizens of America and what’s not.”

Part of what has propelled leaders like Trump to power is a working class electorate that resents the feeling of having been left behind, with advances in tech widening the divide. When asked whether there’s a danger that AI furthers that hurt, Altman responded, “Yes, for sure.”

“This is like, bigger than just a technological revolution … And so it is going to become a social issue, a political issue. It already has in some ways.”

As voters in more than 50 countries, accounting for half the world’s population, head to the polls in…