DailyPost 2450
HAS SAM ALTMAN SHOWN THE MIRROR?
Any visit by top technologist is celebrated in this country and so should it be. These technologists’ entrepreneurs have been deciding not only the tech trajectory of the world, for quite a few decades; but also the way we work, live, play and going a little further the way we think. In this backdrop the recent of visit of the latest tech poster boy, Sam Altman, was bound to in the news. He met the Indian Prime Minister too. Sam Altman is the creator of the ChaptGPT, a large language model, which has taken the world by storm since its release on 30th of Nov. 2022.
Sam heads OpenAI which has been at the centre of GPT development and the large language model revolution and finally ushering in a conversational intelligence model which ChatGPT is. Herein lies its success. While on his visit to India, he lauded the in-building technology platforms such as UPI, Aadhar and the like. He became the talk of the town when in a conversation he stirred up the hornet’s nest by saying that Indians might try to create something like ChatGPT, but they will not be able to. It would be ”totally hopeless.” India works on sentiments and emotions, and can be a difficult place for tech bigwigs, more so the ones who are prone to speaking their minds, without caring if they touching any raw nerve.
The question was asked at an ET event, by Rajan Aandan, formerly Google India head and currently a venture capitalist. Rajan Anandan later tweeted that Sam should never underestimate the Indian entrepreneur. CEO of Tech Mahindra CP Gurnani accepted the ‘challenge’ of building a ChatGPT like AI tool. Sam has replied that his comment has been ’taken out of context.’ These challenges will end up here itself as soon as out tech stalwarts get out of the self-esteem mode. Are we even in the race of making a large language model, if we are, then what are the companies, and what is our stage of development.
For the naïve OpenAI was created in 2015 with an investment of $1 billion, with the likes of Elon Musk and Sam Altman serving as initial board members. Microsoft provided $1 billion in 2019 and $10 billion in 2023. ”OpenAI conducts AI research with the declared intention of promoting and developing friendly AI. Its products are GTP-4, DALL-E, OpenAI Five, ChatGPT and OpenAI Codex. Suffice to say the creation of GPT-4 is a part of tech research movement called the GPT and is moving towards its next version GPT-5. India’s tryst with IT products has been dismal, however much we claim to be one of the leaders in the software industry. The messed tech statup ecosystem is all too well known by now. None of India’s IT giants speak a word about products and research and development. Products are created in labs and R&D centres and not by public pronouncements.
MAKING INDIA A IT PRODUCT HUB WILL BE A MONUMENTAL TASK, EVEN IF STARTED NOW WITH FULL EARNESTNESS.
Sanjay Sahay