OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman briefly appeared at this year’s Microsoft Build to talk with Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott. The timing was notable because it came less than 24 hours after actress Scarlett Johansson accused OpenAI of using a voice “eerily similar” to hers for its GPT-4o chatbot.
Altman did not directly address the dispute, nor did Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest partner. However, he did share that he was surprised by how much he appreciated voice mode in GPT-4o. Regardless, OpenAI’s boss spent nearly 10 minutes giving an inspirational-sounding message about how developers are key to the future of artificial intelligence innovation.
“Developers have been such a core part of what’s been happening in the last year and a half,” he remarks. “There are millions of people who have been on the platform. What people are doing is totally amazing. The speed of adoption and talent and figuring out what to build with all of this over what has really not been very long…when we put GPT-3 in the API, some people thought it was cool, but it was zero revenue. And seeing what people have done with GPT-4 and now what’s happening with GPT-4o…it’s quite remarkable.”
“We’ve never seen a technology get adopted so quickly in such a meaningful way,” he proclaims.
When asked what we should expect over the next few months, Altman says models will continue to gain in intelligence. “If you think about what happened from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4, it just got smarter…it got a little more robust, much safer because the model got smarter and put much more work into building the safety tools around it. It got more useful.”
Later, he would speak more about AI safety, an area his company is often associated with, especially following a coup by board members last November, the departure of key executives and the dismantling of its superalignment team. He shares that when starting out, OpenAI spent a lot of time trying to get its AI to an acceptable level of safety. With GPT-4, it’s assumed to be safe enough. “It’s far from perfect [and] we have more work to do,” Altman states. “But it is generally considered robust enough and safe enough for a wide variety of uses. And that took an enormous amount of work across both teams and fundamental research.”
Altman calls today the most exciting time to build something, whether a product or startup, since at least the mobile boom. He describes the proliferation of AI as a generational platform shift. “This is a special time. Take advantage of it,” he urges developers. “This is not the time to delay what you’re planning to do or wait for the next thing — this is a special moment.”
While not publicized, Altman’s appearance at Build is not surprising. Microsoft announced new integrations with OpenAI at its Build conference, specifically bringing GPT-4o to Copilot+ PCs, AI Azure Studio, and Microsoft Windows.
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