Editor-DN
The evolution in OpenAI is going from bad to worse. Or so it seems to us as an outside observer. Most of the team working on artificial general intelligence (AGI) security issues are believed to have left a few weeks ago. Now it is the turn of the three leaders. Along with chief research officer Bob McGrew and vice president of post-training Barrett Zoff, perhaps the most popular OpenAI executive since Sam Altman, Mira Murthy, the company’s now former chief technology officer. About, to say the least.
This is my idol legacy, which in my opinion has many chapters yet to be written, which we should discuss. The artificial intelligence (AI) scene as we know it, is largely due to everything he did at OpenAI in his six years. No need to beat around the bush — Murthy is responsible for the launch of ChatGPT, the text-to-image generator DALL-E and no doubt played a key role in laying the foundations for the upcoming AI video generator, Sora. has paid . A few days ago, OpenAI announced an advanced voice mode for ChatGPT Plus subscribers, for what they claim are natural, real-time conversations.
The AI landscape you’ve become so accustomed to, and all those hours spent chatting with ChatGPT, you can thank for Murthy’s role in making them a reality. And it’s not just about how we interface with AI. These are the products that have put OpenAI at the very front of the AI race, with tech giants including Google, Meta and Microsoft (whose investments in OpenAI are interesting) scrambling to keep pace. have been OpenAI no longer has the kind of lead it might have had a year or so ago, but its tech still leaves little to chance.
The last 12 months have been tumultuous at OpenAI, but that hasn’t stopped major updates to the GPT and DALL-E models (including the flagship GPT-4o) so far. So much so, Murthy teased that one of the upcoming GPT models (probably as early as 2025) will have “PhD-level intelligence.” Even if not, it’s a statement of intent. One of confidence. This could very well be the reason why Apple finally decided to keep GPT for an intelligent Siri that will roll out over the next few months as part of the phased Apple Intelligence rollout to iPhone, iPad and Mac. will
Murthy has never shied away from a controversy or two. He didn’t have a clear answer as to where the training data for OpenAI’s video generation model Sora comes from. Perhaps a better poker face art would have helped at this point but that’s clearly a skill he doesn’t have (among the many he does have).
I wrote after the inevitable social media firestorm when he predicted that some creative jobs could be replaced by AI in the coming years, that he said what he said, AI in research labs. Based on a broad view of how it is being built. A privilege most of us don’t have, and certainly not the keyboard warriors on X and wherever social media boffins are found. Before OpenAI, she worked at Tesla, and that time coincided with early versions of the Autopilot AI driver assistance software.
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And then in Leap Motion, a company that wanted to replace the keyboard with augmented reality. An idea, way ahead of its time. I remember using the Leap Motion integration in one of HP’s laptops (this must have been early 2014, if memory serves me right).
Murthy has often said that the public—the consumer—must play a role in defining the path of AI. OpenAI products have tried this approach over the years with solid success. Google’s Bard (and later renamed Gemini) and X’s Grok tried to learn in the real world and stumbled. Murthy’s vision for building AGI with the public as part of that conversation, as opposed to building it within the confines of labs, now looks to an uncertain future. We don’t know OpenAI’s next stance yet.
What happens to Sora’s development? Will Marathi’s stamp be seen on this generation’s tool when it finally comes to consumers? Or will Adobe’s own Firefly-based model, which they talked about a few weeks ago, make it to the finish line?
We, at least as of this writing, do not know Marathi’s next destination. The smart money would be on it ending up on Apple (there might be a contract clause or two depending on timing), maybe even on Google. That is, unless he has his heart set on an AI startup — OpenAI’s Ilya Sutskever has already gone down that path.
As Murthy steps away from OpenAI and all that it has helped build over the past few years, his legacy is a leader who has led us to where we are through our interactions with AI. He often gets little credit for it (CEOs do, and it has a lot to do with airtime), but it’s the technology he helped build that has an undeniable impact. is lying I can say with certainty, it hasn’t worked yet.
Vishal Mathur is the Technology Editor of Hindustan Times. TechTonic is a weekly column that looks at the impact of personal technology on our lifestyles, and vice versa. The views expressed are personal.
