OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Reveals Company Hasn’t Trained GPT with Paying Customer Data ‘for a While’
In a recent interview with CNBC, Sam Altman, the current CEO of OpenAI, disclosed that the company had stopped training its large language models, particularly GPT, with customer data for an extended period. According to the CEO, OpenAI’s customers had expressed their dissatisfaction with the utilization of their data for training AI models, prompting the company to revise its plan. OpenAI quietly updated its terms of service on March 1st to reflect this change in policy. The use of AI technology has sparked ethical debates about privacy and the potential risks of its proliferation.
OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, released a statement stating that no data from API clients had been utilized for training purposes for quite some time. Application programming interfaces (APIs) are software frameworks that allow direct access to OpenAI’s technology. Notably, OpenAI’s clients include major companies such as Microsoft, Salesforce, and Snapchat.
Sam Altman also expressed his view on remote work during an event hosted by fintech company Stripe. The CEO argued that having employees working from an office setting was more conducive to creating new products, whereas remote work can lead to confusion. Altman, who is 38 years old, viewed remote work as an experiment and believed that tech industry’s assumption that everyone could work remotely indefinitely was one of its biggest mistakes.
The same Stripe event saw Sam Altman express his belief that assuming everyone could work remotely indefinitely was one of the biggest mistakes made by the tech industry recently. Altman believed that the notion that startups did not need to be physically together, and there would be no loss of creativity was misguided. He further emphasized that technology had not yet advanced to the point where people could work remotely indefinitely, especially in the context of startups. According to Altman, the need for physical proximity and in-person collaboration is essential in fostering creativity and innovation in the workplace.
Reports had surfaced claiming that OpenAI’s losses had doubled to approximately $540 million in 2022. Sources familiar with the company’s financials cited the development of ChatGPT and the recruitment of several executives from Google as among the reasons for this increase. The report also highlighted the significant costs associated with training large language models, which were crucial before ChatGPT was made publicly available.
OpenAI recently released a paid version of its chatbot, and it is expected that the costs associated with training future versions of its software will rise due to the growing number of customers using its AI technology. Meanwhile, it has been reported that Sam Altman has privately discussed the possibility of raising approximately $100 billion in the next few years to develop artificial general intelligence. Such an ambitious endeavor would require a massive infusion of funds that would potentially make OpenAI one of the most well-funded AI research companies globally.
