DailyPost 2406
SAM ALTMAN – THE MAN OF THE MOMENT
Since its onset the digital world, it has been reinventing itself, at quite pace to keep in tune with the developments in technology and the innovative business models to commercially exploit it to the fullest. From Bill Gates to Steve Jobs to Elon Musk, the world has seen, witnessed and experienced Digital Messiahs and even bigger business models and the enterprises that came out as a result. Technologies get commercialized in a variety of ways, but even with exceptional successes and milestones, Artificial Intelligence had never gained the critical mass to be people’s technology.
It was limited to few companies like DeepMind and all the efforts that gone on with IBM Watson. It was more of a testing to prove the capability of the machine. The milestones were huge it is there where it ended. The depth of research without hardly any commercial scruples was missing. OpenAI was created in 2015 as a non-profit with the declared intention of promoting and developing a friendly AI. With the release of ChatGPT on the 30th of Nov 2022, the declared intention seemed to happening. The events since then, overwhelming as they are, in a variety of fields, has proven the same. The man of the moment has to be Sam Altman, the CEO and burning spirit & vision of the company.
If anyone is to watched in the tech field today it is Sam Altman. His conviction has brought us here. There is no purpose in repeating what Internet revolution did to us, blockchain was supposed to be of that potential and magnitude, but is still unfolding, albeit slowly. In contrast, AI would be the most exponential technology the world has ever experienced and GPT the chosen vehicle. Sam Altman in an interview recently told only five years back Artificial General Intelligence, AGI, being talked about as his goal / vision, was both misunderstood and mocked. Even in the AI fraternity there was pettiness and rancour, talking of building AGI needed immense courage in the face of mockery.
‘He doesn’t get mocked as much now,’ says Altman, with a sense of déjà vu, with a rider that the very same people want to pause AI research for six months, so that we can put safety measures in place. The current work is already like living in the science fiction age, and with far reaching changes happening on a daily basis, no one can safely predict, what the world would be like, a couple of years from now. The secondary researches happening on this base technology are creating innumerable use cases, revolutionizing those sectors forever. Adobe, NVIDIA et al have joined a bandwagon. The whole world is the fast-moving laboratory. What does the positive future of AI look like? The challenge is that we don’t know who will control this technology.
DEMOCRATIZATION OF AI IS THE WORLD’S ONLY SAFETY VALVE.
Sanjay Sahay