What Do AI Systems Need to Compete with Humans? Mira Murati: Artificial Intelligence and Humans in the 21st Century
Mira Murati, who worked for OpenAI, says that artificial general intelligence systems will be able to perform a range of cognitive tasks as well as humans.
The remarks reflect her enduring interest in trying to find a way to bring increasingly capable AI systems into the world despite splitting from OpenAI. In October, it was reported that Murati is starting her own startup to develop her own proprietary models and that she could raise over 100 million dollars in venture capital funding. On Tuesday, Murati wouldn’t elaborate about the venture.
She pointed to work on producing synthetic data to train models and the growing investment in computing infrastructure to power them as important areas to follow. Breakthroughs in those areas will enable AGI someday, she said. It isn’t all technological. “This technology is not intrinsically good or bad,” she said. It comes with the two sides. It’s up to society, Murati said, to collectively keep steering the models toward good—so we’re well prepared for the day AGI comes.
Murati didn’t publicly specify why she left OpenAI other than to say the moment felt right to pursue personal exploration. Dozens of early OpenAI employees have left the nonprofit in recent years, some over their frustration with Altman’s increasing focus on generating revenue over pursuing purely academic research. There has been too much obsession over departures that is not enough on the substance of artificial intelligence development, according to Murati.
LinkedIn Meets OpenAI: a German City with a Public Research University and a Chinese Silicon Valley Research Campus (Google+Google+HQ)
According to LinkedIn, Zhai, Beyer, and Kolesnikov all live in Switzerland. The city has a public research university with a renowned computer science department. Apple has also reportedly poached a number of AI experts from Google to work at “a secretive European laboratory in Zurich,” the Financial Times reported earlier this year.
OpenAI said in October it was working on expanding. The company already has offices in San Francisco and London, as well as new outposts in Singapore, Seattle, and New York City.
As they race to develop the most advanced AI models, OpenAI and its rivals are intensely competing to hire a limited pool of top researchers from around the world, often offering them annual compensation packages worth close to seven figures or more. It’s commonplace for the most sought-after talent to hop between companies.
All three of the newly hired researchers already work closely together, according to Beyer’s personal website. While working at DeepMind, he kept a close eye on OpenAI and it’s research, which he frequently posted about on X, which has more than 70,000 followers.
OpenAI’s first text-to-image platform, called Dall-E, was released in 2021 and is an example of the company’s long standing commitment to multimodal artificial intelligence. Its flagship chatbot ChatGPT, however, was initially only capable of interacting with text inputs. The company later added voice and image features as multimodal functionality became an increasingly important part of its product line and AI research. (The latest version of Dall-E is available directly within ChatGPT.) The highly anticipated Sora is a video product developed by Openai, though it hasn’t been widely available.
The Emerging AI Landscape: Vietnam’s Prime Minister and the New Intelligence Restricted Trade-Off for Nvidia Chips
The only one to call in from outside of the country was Huang. He said he lived in Thailand for five years when he was a child, and that he met the prime minister of Thailand today to discuss building world-class artificial intelligence infrastructure in the country.
It’s the latest stop of Huang’s whirlwind tour this year to pitch governments on the idea that they should forge their individual paths to the future by building their own AI infrastructure, processing their own national data, having their own AI systems, and, obviously, buying Nvidia chips for that purpose.
People are starting to realize that there is going to be a digital intelligence infrastructure, just like the energy and communications infrastructure.
Talking to WIRED senior writer Lauren Goode at The Big Interview event on Tuesday in San Francisco, Huang called the trend of AI “a reset of computing as we know of [it] over the last 60 years.” He said that it is not as if you can compete against it. Either you are on this wave or you missed it.
The US and China are two of the world’s leading technology powerhouses and want to be in the forefront of technological changes quicker than anyone else. The two countries collide, and the center of the storm is made up of Nvidia.
The export of components and technologies for chip-making to China will be banned under the new restrictions announced this Monday by the Biden administration. One of the restrictions is on high-bandwidth memory, often used in custom chip designs and used in artificial intelligence. The H20 chips are designed to be sold to Chinese companies without violating the export controls. Nvidia has reportedly stopped taking Chinese orders for H20 chips as early as September, according to Chinese media reports, anticipating the restrictions this week.