Who is replacing ChatGPT's 'father' as interim CEO of OpenAI?

Until the ouster of OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, Mira Murati was the company's "mysterious" chief technology officer. But while Altman was the public face of OpenAI, Murati was the real star of the tech company.

In addition to leading the teams that develop tools like ChatGPT and Dall-E, Murati's job is to ensure those products stay on track, don't mislead people, show bias, or eliminate humanity.

Mira Murati, interim CEO of OpenAI. (Photo: Wired)

In an interview with Wired, Mira Murati said her background is in engineering and she has experience working in aerospace, automotive (developing the Model X for Tesla), VR and AR.

The 34-year-old CEO believes that artificial general intelligence (AGI) will be the most important technology, so she decided to join OpenAI in 2018. From there, she began researching supercomputing strategy and managing several research groups.

AI research has traditionally been done in labs, but Murati is keen to test these products with the public. She believes that building artificial general intelligence (AGI) solely in the lab could have a larger impact on society when it actually arrives, which would be destabilizing. Fine-tuning large language models through reinforcement learning and human feedback is a more effective way to tackle any AI challenge, and a way to engage the public in the conversation.

Sharing her most memorable moment during her time at OpenAI, Murati said it was when she discovered GPT-3's ability to translate languages fluently. She recalled: "I speak Italian, Albanian, and English. I remember once asking GPT to translate English to Italian and surprisingly, even though I had never trained it in Italian, it did a pretty good job."

Since OpenAI released its products, there have been many questions about their immediate impact on issues like copyright, plagiarism, and employment.

Mira Murati said it was important to find a way to release the tool in a safe and responsible way and help people integrate it into their workflows. AI tools will change the entire industry, and there is no point in resisting it. “I think it’s important to embrace it and see how well it goes,” she said.

ChatGPT has huge potential to “expand opportunity for everyone,” Murati says. Generative AI isn’t just a way for students to cheat on deadlines. Instead, it could be a tool for lesson planning and help students learn in new ways.

“With ChatGPT, you can have this limitless interaction and it teaches you complex things in a way that is contextual to you. It's like a personal tutor,” she said.

When asked about OpenAI's move from a purely nonprofit organization to a "limited profit" company that raises capital to train more advanced AI systems, Mira Murati said it was not a simple task.

“To make our models better and safer, you need to deploy them at scale, which costs a lot of money,” she said. “It requires a business plan, because nonprofit funders aren’t going to put up billions of dollars like investors.”

Hoa Vu (Source: Wired)

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