India has truly embraced ChatGPT: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman lauded the high adoption of the company’s viral AI chatbot ChatGPT in India.
“India has been a country that has truly embraced ChatGPT. There has been a lot of early adoption and real enthusiasm from the users,” Altman said in a conversation with Satyan Gajwani, vice chairman of Times Internet, at an event organised by ET in New Delhi.
“We are on an exponential curve, truly… we have an algo that can genuinely and truly learn… and it gets predictably better with scale. The rate of progress in coming years is going to be significant,” said Altman.
On the risk of hundreds of jobs being at risk, Altman said that there will be newer and better jobs going forward.
“In two generations, we can adapt to any amount of labour market change and there are new jobs and they are usually better,” he said. “That is going to happen here, too. Some jobs are going to go away. There will be new better jobs that are difficult to imagine today.”
He added that the speed at which change is happening in the jobs scenario is something governments around the world should consider.
“It is good to have some sort of research effort… training ground-up LLMs or pursuing new research directions or finetuning open source projects, a lot of options there. But a nationally-funded AI effort feels like a good idea,” Altman said on what the government can do with AI.
Altman said that generative AI technology can be used in negative directions, but OpenAI will help manage the risk.
Here are some of the key highlights from what Altman spoke on Wednesday
■ Investor frenzy: Altman said there is a lot of investor frenzy around generative AI at this point, particularly in Silicon Valley. When asked about him putting on his investor hat, Altman said, “Too much of frenzy around AI in the short term. It’s very under-hyped in the long term.”
■ Job losses: “In two generations, we can kind of adapt to any amount of labour market change and there are new jobs and they are usually better. That is going to happen here too. Some jobs are going to go away. There will be new better jobs that are difficult to imagine,” he said.
■ Competition with smaller companies: Altman has said there shouldn’t be any regulation on smaller startups in AI. “We have explicitly said there should be no regulation on smaller companies. The only regulation we have called for is on ourselves and people bigger,” he said.
■ Ethics & AI regulation: “Those are not OpenAI’s decisions to make. It’s for the world to democratise. Our recent funding into such projects is to do that,” the OpenAI chief responded to a question on ethical guidelines in AI. “I think the world can come together. This is an existential risk. If the governments cannot, we will ask the companies to do it.”
