In a sweeping interview last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed a plethora of moral and ethical questions regarding his company and the popular ChatGPT AI model.  

“Look, I don’t sleep that well at night. There’s a lot of stuff that I feel a lot of weight on, but probably nothing more than the fact that every day, hundreds of millions of people talk to our model,” Altman told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in a nearly hour-long interview. 

“I don’t actually worry about us getting the big moral decisions wrong,” Altman said, though he admitted “maybe we will get those wrong too.” 

Rather, he said he loses the most sleep over the “very small decisions” on model behavior, which can ultimately have big repercussions.

These decisions tend to center around the ethics that inform ChatGPT, and what questions the chatbot does and doesn’t answer. Here’s an outline of some of those moral and ethical dilemmas that appear to be keeping Altman awake at night.

According to Altman, the most difficult issue the company is grappling with recently is how ChatGPT approaches suicide, in light of a lawsuit from a family who blamed the chatbot for their teenage son’s suicide.

The CEO said that out of the thousands of people who commit suicide each week, many of them could possibly have been talking to ChatGPT in the lead-up.

“They probably talked about [suicide], and we probably didn’t save their lives,” Altman said candidly. “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.” 

Last month, the parents of Adam Raine filed a product liability and wrongful death suit against OpenAI after their son died by suicide at age 16. In the lawsuit, the family said that “ChatGPT actively helped Adam explore suicide methods.”

Soon after, in a blog post titled “Helping people when they need it most,” OpenAI detailed plans to address ChatGPT’s shortcomings when handling “sensitive situations,” and said it would keep improving its technology to protect people who are at their most vulnerable. 

OpenAI was one of the AI companies that received a $200 million contract from the U.S. Department of Defense to put generative AI to work for the U.S. military. The firm said in a blog post that it would provide the U.S. government access to custom AI models for national security, support and product roadmap information.

China’s market regulator on Monday said that Nvidia violated the country’s anti-monopoly law, according to a preliminary probe, adding that Beijing would continue its investigation into the U.S. chip giant.

Shares of Nvidia were down around 2% in premarket trading.

Late last year, China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) opened an investigation into Nvidia in relation to the acquisition of Mellanox and some agreements made during the acquisition. Nvidia acquired the Israeli technology company that creates network solutions for data centers and servers in 2020, in a deal that was approved by China at the time with certain conditions.

In a preliminary investigation, the SAMR said Nvidia had violated China’s anti-monopoly laws in relation to that acquisition and its conditions. China’s market regulator did not specify how Nvidia allegedly breached the country’s laws.

CNBC has reached out to Nvidia for comment.

The update from the SAMR has the potential to complicate trade talks between Chinese and U.S. officials that began on Sunday in Madrid, Spain.

Tensions between Beijing and Washington appear to be on the rise on the technology front. China opened two separate probes into semiconductors on Saturday: one is an anti-dumping investigation into certain chips imported from the U.S., while the other is an anti-discrimination scrutiny of U.S. restrictions on China’s chip industry.

This is a breaking news story. Please check back for more.

Humanoid robots, which have made significant technological advances this year, may be at the precipice of a ChatGPT-like spike in investment and popularity — or at least, that’s what many in the industry believe. 

So-called humanoid robots are artificial intelligence-powered machines designed to resemble humans in appearance and movement, with expected use cases across the industrial and service sectors. 

Makers of these robots have been working on the technology in the background for years. Now, they say they’re ready to unleash the technology into the world. 

“There is a consensus in our industry that the ChatGPT moment for humanoid robots has arrived,” Xiong Youjun, general manager at the Beijing Innovation Center for Humanoid Robotics, said during a panel in Singapore on Thursday, alongside other professionals from China’s robotics industry.

“This year has been defined as the first year of mass production of humanoid robots,” Xiong, chief technology officer and executive director of robotics firm UBTech, said in Mandarin translated by CNBC. He added that there had been rapid progress in both the mechanical bodies and the AI-powered “brains.”

The original “ChatGPT moment” occurred in late 2022, when OpenAI released its groundbreaking generative AI chatbot to the public, leading to mass adoption of large language models and widespread recognition of their potential. 

Robotics players hoping to recreate that impact include Tesla’s Optimus. Meanwhile, a growing number of humanoid robot start-ups are emerging in China, with companies like Unitree, Galbot, Agibot and UBtech Robotics bringing products to market. 

While humanoid robots are yet to reach a fraction of the adoption seen with generative AI, many experts do expect the technology to have a transformative impact on the global economy in a matter of years. 

Meanwhile, robots have begun to appear everywhere, from factories to technology conferences and sporting events. 

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said he expects the company to produce 5,000 of its Optimus robots this year, with the technology expected to eventually make up the majority of the EV maker’s business.

Meanwhile, humanoid robot firms in China say their products are already being used in factories and for commercial services. 

Speaking on Thursday, Zhao Yuli, chief strategy officer at Galbot, said the start-up had already deployed almost 1,000 robots across different businesses. 

Other companies, such as UBTech Robotics and Galbot, have also installed robots in local factories, according to local media reports. 

According to Zhao, these deployments have come alongside a surge of investor interest and government support in the sector, as well as the maturation of both robotics and generative AI technology. 

Industry experts noted that this maturation in technology has been on display at a number of conferences and events this year, such as China’s World Humanoid Robotics Game, which sees robots compete in practical scenarios. 

Galbot won a gold medal in the Robot Skills event after placing first in a pharmaceutical sorting challenge. 

Improvements in Chinese humanoid robots’ motion control have also been on display in recent months at sporting events such as marathons and boxing matches. 

Guo Yandong, founder and CEO of AI² Robotics, added that improvements in generative AI have also enabled robots to learn on the job rather than rely solely on preset commands, a shift that could expand the uses of humanoids across sectors.