Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and co-founder of ChatGPT, will not be meeting in-person with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to Israel this week, according to sources in the high-tech industry. The reported refusal is rumored to be in response to Netanyahu’s controversial plan to overhaul Israel’s judiciary, which has faced strong opposition from the country’s high-tech sector.
Altman’s visit to Israel is part of his worldwide tour, during which he has met with world leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to discuss regulations in the field of artificial intelligence. Last week, Altman testified before a U.S. Senate Committee about the potential of AI.
Altman did, however, speak on the phone with Netanyahu on Monday to discuss the opportunities and challenges regarding the spread of artificial intelligence. The conversation also included discussions of the possibility of cooperation with Israel in developing the field of AI.
During Altman’s visit to Israel, he met with Israel’s President Issac Herzog and Microsoft developers at the company’s Israeli development center. Altman is also scheduled to give a lecture at Tel Aviv University and answer questions from the audience.
OpenAI has received significant investment from Microsoft and made headlines with the launch of GPT-3, a language model that can understand and create texts, as well as the release of Dall-E, an AI engine that creates images and art from a text description, and the ChatGPT chatbot. In January, Microsoft invested $10 billion in the company.
