OpenAI, the company behind the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, recently had to confirm that it is not currently training the powerful AI system GPT 5. This revelation came from Sam Altman, their CEO, during an event at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Altman was asked about the open letter that had circulated among some of the tech’s elite, including Elon Musk, urging companies to pause the development of any AI system that could be more powerful than GPT-4.
ChatGPT has been extremely popular in its short time, with more than 100 million active users each month. Its fame also carries deep-rooted concerns about the potential impact of this AI system; concerns that range from safety, privacy and employment issues.
However, Altman’s talk focused on the importance of the technical nuances of development, which He believes the open letter missed.He went on to confirm that OpenAI is not working on training GPT-5, but instead more on addressing existing safety issues related to other AI tools they have been developing.
There has been a long-standing debate about the implications of AI, both in safety and ethics, that has been disputed among many high-profile tech figures, including signatories of the open letter, such as Musk, Steve Wozniak and Professor Stuart Russell. This has been followed by the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) officially announcing that it will be setting a common policy for privacy regarding AI technology. To back this up, Italy has taken the decisive action to ban ChatGPT, with Germany’s commissioner for data protection also indicating that it may follow suit.
These debates put the spotlight on OpenAI and other companies in the AIs field to address the issues at hand responsibly and ethically. It is clear that proper communication and collaboration between all stakeholders is a key factor to ensure that AI is developed sustainably in the future.
OpenAI is a technology company, founded in 2015 and led by AI experts such as Sam Kirshnamurthy, Greg Brockman, Andrej Karpathy and Ilya Sutskever, among others. They have endeavored to create the most advanced and responsible AI possible, while also pushing the boundaries of game theory and understanding human language. They have further become well-known for their trail-blazing research on topics such as unsupervised learning, computer vision and robotics.
Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI and a leader in the open source software industry. He is a highly successful author, investor and entrepreneur with technology being his main focus. He is engaged in multiple companies as a founder and mentor, such as Y Combinator, Reddit, Quora and more recently his own startup Invitebase. He also serves on the board of various organizations such as the OpenAI board directors and the Y Combinator Continuity Fund. In addition, he is an outspoken advocate of ethical AI technology and a signatory of the influential open letter that urged tech companies to pause development of AI systems that are more powerful than GPT-4.