That’s misleading. Altman was simply doing a napkin calculation based on the scale at which ChatGPT operates and not estimating based on internal data:
“There are 15,000 people a week that commit suicide,” Altman told the podcaster. “About 10% of the world are talking to ChatGPT. That’s like 1,500 people a week that are talking, assuming this is right, to ChatGPT and still committing suicide at the end of it. They probably talked about it. We probably didn’t save their lives. Maybe we could have said something better. Maybe we could have been more proactive. Maybe we could have provided a little bit better advice about ‘hey, you need to get this help, or you need to think about this problem differently, or it really is worth continuing to go on and we’ll help you find somebody that you can talk to’.”You could similarly say something like 10k+ people used Google or spoke to a friend this week and still killed themselves.
Many of those people may have never mentioned their depression or suicidal tendencies to ChatGPT at all.
I think Altman appropriately recognizes that at the scale at which they operate, there’s probably a lot more good they can do in this area, but I don’t think he thinks (nor should he think) that they are responsible for 1,500 deaths per week.
mossTechnician|2 months ago