Sam Altman testifies in front of Senators

Plus he's doing it for the love of it

Author

The Alignment
May 16, 2023

All eyes have been on Google over the past few days given the wide host of AI announcements that the company made.

Naturally, OpenAI had something to say about this as they too have made some pretty interesting announcements (perhaps in response to all the attention Google is getting ?). Oh and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also appeared in front of Congress.

As always if you enjoy reading our posts be sure to spread the word !

Here’s what we have lined up for you today -

  1. Open AI CEO Sam Altman testifies in congress

  2. OpenAI is gearing up for an open source language model

  3. Fresh plugins for all ChatGPT Plus users

  4. Google wants to dance with Microsoft

  5. Amazon + Generative AI = Future of Product Discovery ?

  6. Sam’s doing it for the love of it !

Congressional hearings with regards to tech are often anything but easygoing. Over the years Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and other tech luminaries have had to come down to Washington DC and defend the actions of their companies.

Well, Sam Altman’s experience was quite the opposite as he seemed to largely align with the senators’ sentiments of the need to regulate AI and adjacent technologies that folks at his company (and others) are building.

Here’s a breakdown of what went down -

  • Sam recommended that a new separate agency should be formed to licence companies that are working on building very large language models.

  • He believes that AI is potentially having its “printing press” moment but things could go very wrong if not handled properly.

  • He acknowledged that AI will likely have a significant impact on the economy and there is a possibility that the labour force might look quite different.

  • He acknowledged the threat of misinformation and the need to identify it.

  • Recommended that companies like OpenAI should be independently audited.

Senators seem to be warming up well to both Sam and the potential of AI. There seems to be bipartisan agreement on the topic. There will be a lot of visits to Washington for Sam and other AI leaders over the coming months and years. It seems like Sam has at least got the attention of policymakers to listen to what he and other AI folks have to recommend in terms of policy making and regulation.

Apparently OpenAI is in plans to release its first open source language model (in a long while).

Of course the company is not open-sourcing GPT 4, but it’s an interesting move nonetheless. OpenAI has received some flak for not living up to its name of being “Open” so this perhaps will silence some of the critics (well that depends on what exactly they choose to open source).

Meta’s leading the way in building an arsenal of powerful open-source models and it’s very likely that OpenAI wants to engage with the open-source community to unlock potential innovation.

The launch timeline is uncertain, but knowing OpenAI it should be pretty soon.

Bard is building plugins and not charging for them ? That’s cool, but OpenAI is launching over 70+ plugins for ChatGPT plus users. At this point the race is in full effect.

Plugins could be the “app store” equivalent of ChatGPT. The possibilities are endless .

Around the industry -

Sundar is coming to tango with Satya. In an in depth interview, Sundar Pichai CEO of Google discussed Google’s AI strategy, what users can expect and how they see the competitive landscape.

So grab your headphones and decide for yourselves how Google is going to stack up against Microsoft+OpenAI’s early moves.

This should hardly come as a surprise. Amazon has mastered the customer purchase journey, will they disrupt themselves and create the next paradigm for how users discover and purchase products online with conversational product discovery experiences?

Doing it for the love of it !

Sam Altman testifies that he owns no equity in OpenAI, and that he is doing it for the love of it 😃