Since its launch in November, ChatGPT has become popular worldwide. It hit one million users just five days and this week it was announced as the fastest growing app in history, growing faster than social media including Instagram and TikTok.
OpenAI, a company that makes advanced chatbots, has been similarly high-profile, attracting a $10 billion investment from Microsoft last month that made it worth $29 billion. With the sky apparently the limit for ChatGPT and potential applications, Sam Altman, Stanford dropout who co-founded OpenAI in 2015, said the advanced artificial general intelligence (AGI) ChatGPT finally aspires to be still in infancy. And if something goes right for OpenAI, it could disrupt the economic model that Altman fought against when he started the company.
“I think if AGI really does happen, I can imagine all these ways it could destroy capitalism,” Altman said in an interview with Forbes published there.
When Altman founded OpenAI, he and a group of early investors including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel set out to fight Google’s growing hegemony in the artificial intelligence space. Google has just completed the $500 million acquisition of DeepMind, the London-based AI startup that two years ago achieved a major breakthrough by cataloging almost every known protein in the human body.
Opposing the notion that a single tech giant can monopolize AI research for years, Altman said that OpenAI’s mission is the opposite: Democratize artificial intelligence and distribute its benefits equally by continuously sharing the work, research, and work of companies around the world. even a patent.
“Our goal is to develop digital intelligence in the most useful way for humanity as a whole, without the constraints of financial returns. Because our research is free from financial obligations, we can focus more on positive human impact,” said the company in a statement in 2015 when it was launched .
When Microsoft confirmed it would expand its partnership with OpenAI last month, CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement that the two companies have ambitions to “democratize AI as a new technology platform.”
But the skeptics cannot understand that OpenAI is starting to act less anti-capitalist than it is now, because its financial fate is tied to Microsoft, which is almost responsible for the AI startup until OpenAI can pay back. The tech giant’s initial investment plus interest. Internal conflicts over OpenAI’s identity take center stage in the coming months and years fortune The magazine’s latest cover story by Jeremy Kahn with reporting by Michal Lev-Ram and Jessica Mathews. Khan spoke to several former employees at OpenAI who left the company due to “cultural and strategic shifts,” including a reduced emphasis on democratizing AI
OpenAI announced this week that it will test a monthly subscription plan for ChatGPT, Altman said write on Twitter in December that they would “have to monetize at some point.”
In an interview with Forbes, Altman said he still believes that OpenAI can balance between the goal of democratization and new money-making interests. “I think capitalism is great. I love capitalism,” he said, adding that while he sees capitalism as the best economic model of a bad group, he still hopes “we find a better way.”
He reiterated that no company owns artificial intelligence and takes advantage of it, adding that he is doing everything he can for OpenAI to prevent it from happening.
“We’ve tried to design a structure that, as far as I know, is unlike any other company structure,” he said. “If we really get AGI and it breaks, we need something different [in company structure].”
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