In a surprise appearance during the Microsoft Build, the annual developer conference of the Redmond company, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, shared his impressions on advances in artificial intelligence and offered a series of key tips to developers. OpenAI has been an essential partner for Microsoft, providing the underlying technology for ChatGPT, which has allowed the company to integrate advanced AI (Copilot) into its services.
At the end of the Tuesday’s opening conference, Kevin Scott, CTO of Microsoft, invited Altman to the stage. The conversation began with Scott asking Altman about what has surprised him the most about AI in the last year. Altman highlighted the rapid adoption of this technology and the incredible progress in its implementation. “I had never seen a technology being adopted so quickly and in such a significant way,” commented Altman. He also emphasized the importance of the APIs developed by OpenAI, which allow developers to create new AI applications that benefit consumers worldwide.
Altman stated that OpenAI strives to make its APIs accessible and useful for developers, making it easy to incorporate AI into various products and services. “We try to make it easy for you to add [artificial] intelligence to whatever you’re doing, to any product, to any service,” he said.
When Scott asked Altman to share what to expect from the future of AI, Altman pointed out that models will become increasingly intelligent and useful in all areas. The CEO of OpenAI highlighted the significant progress between GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4, and anticipated that future developments will continue this trend of growth in intelligence and usefulness.
Altman also mentioned specific aspects that OpenAI is focusing on, such as speed, cost, and multimodality. For example, GPT-4 reduced both the price and latency of its tokens by half, and the recently launched GPT-4 introduced voice mode.
To conclude, Altman encouraged developers to take advantage of the current moment of change in the AI sector, comparing this stage with the technological evolution after the rise of mobile telephony and the Internet, and urged developers not to delay their projects. “My biggest advice is that this is a special moment and we must take advantage of it,” Altman said.
