You Won’t Believe How OpenAI’s Mira Murati is Revolutionizing Generative AI in the Real World!

For Mira Murati, chief technology officer of OpenAI, the evening of November 29 was no different from the others. That evening she returned home from the start-up’s San Francisco offices after her team wrapped up the release of an experimental product: ChatGPT.

ChatGPT was presented as a research demonstration. That plan changed dramatically when the chatbot reached 1 million users within five days of launch. Murati, which was at least an order of magnitude short of his expectations, realized that the company was at the forefront of the race to commercialize generative AI: artificial intelligence systems capable of rapidly producing text, images and human content.

“This reality check has been incredibly important in understanding what to really prioritize and where to go next,” said Murati, who leads the technology team for the 375-person company led by CEO Sam Altman. “We definitely had a major shift when we set out to make the product and implement the technology.”

Now, Murati is leading OpenAI’s efforts for positioning Chat GPT as a standalone product, looking for ways to capitalize on its popularity with tens of millions of consumers, following the dramatic rise of the chatbot. But he insists that despite new financial imperatives, the company’s core ambition remains unchanged.

“Our mission is to get to artificial general intelligence and figure out how to implement it in a safe way,” he said, referring to future software that could perform a variety of human-level cognitive tasks. “And so we’re always very careful not to lose sight of that.”

Meanwhile, the company is reshaping the technology sector. The launch of ChatGPT, which has around 100 million users a month according to SimilarWeb, has led tech giants like Google to redesign their AI strategy and do away with rival chatbots. Companies around the world have begun experimenting with the technology in the belief that it can transform the media, finance, law and professional services industries.

Soon after the release of ChatGPT, Microsoft agreed to a “multi-year, multi-billion dollar” investment in Open AI estimated at $10 billion. The Seattle-based group is also incorporating the underlying technology into its Office suite of productivity apps, a lucrative base of hundreds of millions of large corporate clients.

The chatbot helped clarify the clear commercial value of generative AI for Murati and OpenAI senior management. “Our implementation strategy has now extended to… the ChatGPT platform where we have a direct relationship with the user,” she said. “We can ask them for their feedback, their preferences and use that feedback. . . to improve the code,” he added.

A mechanical engineer who previously worked at augmented reality start-up Magic Leap and electric car maker Tesla, Murati joined the company in 2018 while it was still a nonprofit research lab. He now oversees the mass-market deployment of the OpenAI suite of products, including AI image generator Dall-E, AI Codex code generator, and ChatGPT.

Since she joined, her role has evolved into testing OpenAI’s technology in the real world, so industry partners can build AI versions of products in everything from education, financial services, to law. and to health care.

Murati’s team has begun work on offering an enterprise subscription to ChatGPT, which will allow customers to customize versions of ChatGPT for specific purposes. They have also launched so-called plug-ins, which allow users to stay within ChatGPT while performing tasks such as surfing the web, buying groceries, and booking restaurant tables via Instacart and OpenTable.

Today OpenAI, like many software companies in Silicon Valley, markets itself as a “platform” company, with two types of offerings: one is their API or application programming interface, which allows third parties to integrate the software of OpenAI in their paid products, and the other is ChatGPT. Microsoft, its largest shareholder, will be an independent third revenue channel.

“[ChatGPT] it allows us to reach out to people directly and gather feedback and make our models more aligned, more useful,” Murati said. “And [the API] it’s a platform that allows other people to build on our models.”

OpenAI’s API customers include a range of companies such as education start-up Khan Academy, social media company Snap, and wealth managers such as Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. Everyone pays to tailor the tool to their individual needs. OpenAI, which reportedly made $28 million in 2022, predicted it would make $200 million in 2023.

The company needs to raise revenues to finance the staggering costs of the computing power needed to train and run large AI models, with Altman recently describing the company as on track to become “the start-up at most capital-intensive in Silicon Valley history”.

Estimates put the cost of running ChatGPT, assuming 10 million monthly users, at $1 million per day. Microsoft chief Satya Nadella said Microsoft had built a supercomputer to handle the work of OpenAI and could now handle some AI computations at half the cost of its rivals.

The potential risks of AI software, especially as it becomes more powerful, are in the spotlight of policy makers and the business and research communities.

Among these are challenges such as the spread of AI-generated manipulation and disinformation. Longer term, there are concerns about the existential risks of AI technology possibly behaving in unethical ways, without a sense of human morality.

Last month, 350 industry insiders, including Altman, said mitigating AI’s extinction risk should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks like pandemics and nuclear war.

Murati said he supports the use of technical “guardrails” to reduce, eradicate or even prevent some of these hazards.

“Progress is happening very fast, obviously,” he said. “But today we use these systems more as assistance tools. We do not rely on them blindly or entirely. They are more like tools that improve our productivity [and] creativity”.