In recent months, Sam Altman, the creator of ChatGPT or DALL E 2, has become the most recognizable face and character in the AI world that everyone wants to know about.
And it is that, the artificial intelligence, once considered the stuff of science fiction, has gone mainstream in recent years with large chatbots and tools emerging every day. Of course, not everything stops here and artificial intelligence is also driving technological innovation with new algorithms, autonomous robots and software applications.
However, there is a company with the name OpenAI that has captured all the prominence along with two great tools: ChatGPT and DALL·E 2. This has led to increased interest in AI among techies and non-techies alike due to these developments.
On the one hand we have DALL·E and its improved version DALL E 2which can transform text descriptions you imagine into an AI-generated image in a matter of seconds, and ChatGPT, a chatbot of AI that can answer user questions with an almost creepy humanity.
OpenAI, the company that now stars the figure of Sam Altman and not that of Elon Musk
Both have been developed by this company, Open AIa San Francisco-based AI research-focused company founded in 2015 by former Y Combinator president Sam Altman, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and other investors who pledged $1 billion to the project.
The mission of the company, as they explain, is “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity”according to its statutes.
Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, another of its strengths, refers to the still-undeveloped ability of a machine to learn and understand anything a human can do, he defines it as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans in the most economically valuable jobs”.
OpenAI was originally released as a non-profit organization, but in 2019 the company created a “limited profit” company called OpenAI LPwhich now employs most of the company’s workers.
Several months after switching to this model, it announced that it received a billion-dollar investment from Microsoft and would run its services on Microsoft Azure. The two companies have also agreed to work together to create new AI supercomputing technologies on Microsoft Azure. Even now Microsoft incorporates ChatGPT in its Bing search engine.
Sam Altman, the new guru of artificial intelligence
However, despite all this madness, we want to focus especially on the figure of Sam Altam, whose biography you can check in the following Business Insider article. Well, despite having come to the fore in recent months, his notoriety is not new: It has already been in the Silicon Valley limelight for almost two decades.
Altman entered the world of technology fresh out of college in 2005. In the same vein as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, he abandoned his computer science degree at Stanford University to found a company that allowed users share their geolocation called Loopt.
Loopt managed to raise more than 30 million dollars (28 million euros) in venture capital before being adopted by companies such as Apple and Blackberry. After seven years, Loopt did not prosper and Green Dot Corporation, an American financial technology and banking holding company, bought the company for more than 40 million euros.
Despite all this, Altman was already someone in this world, joining Tesla boss Elon Musk, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and other backers in 2015 to co-found OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research and development company that intended to promote a “Friendly AI in a way that benefits all of humanity.”
In 2016, Altman first announced that OpenAI was building an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), known as GPT-1.. For the last 3 years, OpenAI has been releasing GPT models on a yearly basis. In 2018 they finally presented GPT-1, then GPT-2 in 2019, and finally, GPT-3 arrived in 2020.
In May 2020 OpenAI introduced GPT-3, the largest neural network ever created that revolutionized the world of AI. GPT-3 could turn a web page description into code, could imitate people, write poetry or songs, and thousands of other functions.
Behind this, first it was DALL Ean AI capable of generating an image based on a user’s description, which came out on January 5, 2021. It was later upgraded to its version DALL·E 2 (released in January 2022).
While GPT-3 uses its knowledge of the language to generate text, OpenAI’s Image GPT model is capable of generating pixels in sequence to create images for the OpenAI text-to-image tools DALL E and DALL E 2.
While DALL·E could generate images from text descriptions, DALL·E 2 can generate more realistic and accurate images with four times better resolution than its predecessor, according to OpenAI.
And then there is ChatGPT, the chatbot where users get entertaining and intelligent answers to questions of all kinds based on GPT 3.5. OpenAI launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, and according to Altman, within five days it had reached one million users.
Elon Musk, who left the OpenAI board in 2018, tweeted that “ChatGPT is scarily good” and? “we are not far from a dangerously strong AI”.
There are other AI projects but they have not generated as much enthusiasm
OpenAI has developed other projects that have generated excitement in the tech community but don’t get the same attention as DALL E or ChatGPT. OpenAI Codex, for example, translates natural language into code and was used to develop GitHub Copilot, which autocompletes code for computer programmers.
It also recently introduced Whisper, an automatic speech recognition system that can transcribe spoken language more accurately than existing technology, according to the company. Trained with 680,000 hours of multilingual data, Whisper can transcribe speech with accents, background noise, and technical language.
The skepticism of some investors before the figure of Sam Altman
Despite recent advances, some investors and researchers have been skeptical on the possibility that Altman could generate significant revenue from OpenAI technology and achieve its stated goal of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI).
It has also faced broader concerns from members of the AI community for leading the company away from its promise to make its research transparent and avoid enriching shareholders. Instead, OpenAI has become more closed over time, according to the researchers.
“They want to acquire more and more data, more and more resources, to build great models”says Emad Mostaque, founder of Stability AI, a competing company that has placed fewer restrictions on its Stable Diffusion imaging program, making it open source and free for developers.
According to an OpenAI spokeswoman, the company has made its technology available to developers in a number of ways, for example by opening up certain AI models.
The future of artificial intelligence according to its co-founder
The co-founder claims that the latest and most advanced versions of ChatGPT they will be deployed very little by little so that people, institutions and policy makers become familiar with it, “Thinking about the implications, feeling the technology, getting an idea of what it can and can’t do”it states.
In his opinion, the revolution brought about by the “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) is unstoppable”. In an essay titled “Moore’s Law for Everything,” Altman wrote that the technological progress that AGI will bring in the next 100 years and “It will be far greater than anything we’ve done since we first controlled fire and invented the wheel.”
On the other hand, all the rumors point that we should be close to GPT-4. Despite what was expected of this news about artificial intelligence, exact details about GPT-4 have been rather scant.
OpenAI has not revealed much information about the new model, such as its features or its capabilities. However, advances in the field of AI may offer some clues as to what we can expect from GPT-4.
One thing that is already certain is that will be able to generate more human-like texts and answer user questions in a more natural way than previous versions of the model, as we have already seen with ChatGPT. It will have more parameters than GPT-3, yes, but not as many as rumored, and GPT-4 is likely to be less dependent on the precision of the instructions.
Regarding the gold issue regarding Google, in an interview he stated that although he does not believe that ChatGPT will replace this search engine, he thinks an AI system could one day do it.
“I mean, I don’t think it’s ChatGPT. But I think one day an AI system could do it. More than that though, I think people are totally missing out if they focus on yesterday’s news. I’m very interested in it.” thinking more about what comes beyond the search”, explained.
And it is that, Sam Altman, as he has stated on many occasions, does not have his mind focused on what is currently happening with Bing or Bard. Of course, OpenAI goes much further and we can only wait to see everything they have prepared for us.