It was a routine evening on November 29 for Mira Murati, OpenAI’s CTO, as she headed home from the San Francisco office. Little did she know that the experimental product her team had just released, ChatGPT, would skyrocket to one million users in a mere five days. Surprise, surprise! This rapid success made it crystal clear that OpenAI was leading the pack in the race to commercialize generative AI.
Murati, who admits to underestimating the chatbot’s popularity by a country mile, now finds herself at the helm of OpenAI’s effort to turn ChatGPT into a standalone product. And although the stakes are high and the financial pressure is on, Murati insists that OpenAI’s core mission remains the same: to create artificial general intelligence (AGI) safely.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, AGI refers to future software that can perform a wide range of cognitive tasks at a human level. No biggie.
As ChatGPT’s user base ballooned to around 100 million users per month, tech titans like Google scrambled to revise their AI strategies and launch their own chatbots. Industries such as media, finance, law, and professional services began exploring the chatbot’s potential, eager to ride the wave of AI transformation.
As luck would have it, Microsoft came calling with a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar”investment in OpenAI (rumored to be around $10 billion). The tech giant also plans to integrate the underlying technology across its Office suite of productivity apps, exposing OpenAI to a vast market of enterprise customers.
ChatGPT’s runaway success served as a wake-up call for Murati and OpenAI’s top brass, highlighting the immense value of generative AI. By fostering a direct relationship with users, OpenAI can gather valuable feedback to improve its code.
Murati, who joined OpenAI in 2018 when it was still a non-profit research lab, now oversees mass-market distribution of products like AI image-generator Dall-E, AI code generator Codex, and ChatGPT. Her role centers on putting OpenAI’s technology to the test in the real world, enabling partners to create AI versions of products for a variety of industries.
In a bid to cash in on ChatGPT’s popularity, Murati’s team is working on a business subscription service that would allow clients to customize the chatbot for specific use cases. They’ve also launched Plugins, which enable users to perform tasks like browsing the web, shopping for groceries, and booking restaurant tables through services like Instacart and OpenTable, all while staying inside ChatGPT.
OpenAI now proudly identifies as a “platform”company, offering an API (application programming interface) for third-party integration and ChatGPT as standalone products. Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest shareholder, will serve as a third, independent revenue channel.
It’s no secret that OpenAI needs to ramp up its revenue to cover the staggering costs of computing power needed for training and running large AI models. CEO Sam Altman has even described the company as on track to be “the most capital-intensive start-up in Silicon Valley history.”Gulp.
With ChatGPT’s running costs estimated at $1 million per day (assuming 10 million monthly users), Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella claims the company has built a supercomputer to handle OpenAI’s workload and can now perform some AI calculations at half the cost of its competitors.
As AI software becomes more powerful, concerns about its potential risks are top of mind for policymakers and business and research communities. Challenges such as AI-generated manipulation, misinformation, and long-term ethical risks have put the industry on high alert.
Last month, 350 industry insiders (including Altman) declared that mitigating the risk of AI-triggered extinction should be a global priority, on par with threats like pandemics and nuclear war. Murati supports the idea of implementing technical “guardrails”to minimize or prevent these dangers.
“Progress is happening very fast, obviously,”she said. “But today, we use these systems more like assistive tools. We don’t rely on them blindly, or entirely. They’re more like tools that enhance our productivity [and] creativity.”
And so, with a blend of caution and ambition, OpenAI continues to push the boundaries of AI, hoping to shape the future without losing sight of its mission. As they say, with great power comes great responsibility.
