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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman | AI for the Next Era
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman | AI for the Next Era

Sam Altman
Greylock, 2023
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9

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As artificial intelligence evolves, its ability to work alongside humans solving complex problems in fields such as medicine, finance and governance becomes increasingly critical. Examples include OpenAI’s GPT-3 language generator, image creation platform DALL-E, and code generator Copilot. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicts that within a few years, AI will fuel an explosion of advances in all major industries, and disrupt the global economy. Altman joined Greylock partner Reid Hoffman during the company’s recent Intelligent Future summit. Altman’s answers were prompted by questions from Hoffman and the audience.

Summary

Multiple players can create distinct businesses based on APIs created by large models.

Today, successful AI-based copywriting or educational service businesses are possible. People haven’t yet seen the “trillion-dollar take” on Google, but people are beginning to think, “How did the fundamental things change?”

Today’s chatbot interfaces work well, opening possibilities for large companies to provide medical services, education or meaningful advice. Soon, multimodal models will create more opportunities. People are working with agents that use computers for natural language communication and coding. Early versions of this include Copilot and DALL-E.

An explosion of new companies will use this type of interface or “API” on breakthrough technological platforms which people haven’t seen since mobile devices were introduced.

People starting an AI business should consider specialized training on existing models.

People will build on a handful of basic large models, but it’s unclear whether start-ups can successfully train proprietary models. What will probably happen is that many...

About the Author

Samuel H. Altman is an American entrepreneur, investor and programmer. He is CEO of OpenAI and the former president of Y Combinator. 

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