- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted that he finally watched the movie "Ex Machina."
- The 2015 sci-fi film details the story of an uncontrollable AI-powered robot.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, spent Wednesday night watching the 2015 movie "Ex Machina" for the first time.
The movie details the story of a rich tech billionaire, Nathan, who creates an AI-powered humanoid robot named Ava.
Nathan wants to push that inquiry one step further and recruits the help of his employee Caleb to determine how close Ava is to complete human consciousness — or artificial general intelligence.
Nathan asks Caleb to administer a Turing test of sorts, referring to a test originally developed by the computer scientist Alan Turing to determine whether a machine can think like a human, but sometimes used more generally to describe behavioral tests for "presence of mind" according to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Ultimately, Ava becomes uncontrollable and escapes into human society, killing Nathan and abandoning Caleb in the process.
The film — now more than eight years old — seems more prescient than ever given the current AI boom, which was largely fueled by OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Altman himself has written about the risks of artificial general intelligence and signed letters about the threats posed by AI.
But in a tweet Thursday morning, Altman said that while he thought "Ex Machina" was a "pretty good movie," he still wasn't sure why "everyone" told him to watch it.
—Sam Altman (@sama) June 1, 2023
In the comments of Altman's tweet some Twitter users suggested that our current reality is even stranger than fiction:
—Ahmed Reza (@AhmedRezaT) June 1, 2023
Another user pointed to the limits of the Turing test in evaluating a AI's capability:
—abdullah (@bdullahmostafa) June 1, 2023
Perhaps the biggest difference between Ava and ChatGPT? The power of seduction.
"GPT-4 hasn't tried to seduce you has it?" one user asked.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to Insider's request for a comment.