OpenAI boss Sam Altman seeks funding from Microsoft to build ‘superintelligence’

Sam Altman is reportedly seeking additional financial backing from major investor Microsoft as the OpenAI boss looks to build “super-smart” tech tools that would be as smart as humans.

Altman already secured a $10 billion “multi-year” deal between Microsoft and the maker of ChatGPT earlier this year, expanding a partnership that began in 2019 with just $1 billion from the big tech company.

However, the 38-year-old AI genius wants even more funding to speed OpenAI’s commercialization of new AI advances as competition heats up with Google, which is in talks to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Character. .AI, according to Reuters – an AI bot startup developed by two former Google employees.

“The vision is to create artificial general intelligence (AGI), figure out how to make it secure and discover the benefits,” Altman told the Financial timesnoting that he is also spending time researching “how to build superintelligence” and ways to develop computing power to do so.

Companies like IBM describes AGI has “an intelligence equal to that of humans” that “would have a self-awareness that has the ability to solve problems, learn and plan for the future.”

IBM added that AGI “only exists today as a theoretical concept in the face of a tangible reality.”

Altman sees AGI as the next phase of evolution for his booming company.

“Right now, people [say] ‘you have this research lab, you have this API [software], you have the partnership with Microsoft, you have this ChatGPT, now there is a GPT store. But those are not really our products,” Altman told the outlet.

“Those are channels to our only product, which is intelligence, magical intelligence in the sky. I think that’s what it’s all about”.

When asked if Microsoft would continue to invest more in these companies, Altman told the FT: “I hope so.”

The recent $10 billion OpenAI-Microsoft partnership valued Altman’s AI company at about $29 billion, sources told the Financial Times, with Altman noting that everything about the deal was “working very well.” .

“Revenue growth has been good this year,” Altman said in an interview with the outlet, although he’s hungry for more.

“There is a long way to go and a lot of computing to develop between here and AGI. . . The training expenses are enormous,” he added.

Altman remained coy about how much more money he expected Microsoft to dole out or how much the company is currently spending on training.

OpenAI is reportedly on track to rack up $1 billion in sales over the next 12 months, thanks to its cash cow ChatGPT, which launched a $20-a-month subscription service earlier this year.

OpenAI’s finances, however, are private, and Altman has made clear that he has no plans to go public anytime soon, perhaps because he doesn’t need to raise any additional capital and doesn’t want to give up any control of the company. powerful technology company.

“When we develop superintelligence, we are likely to make some decisions that public market investors would view very strangely,” Altman said at an event in Abu Dhabi earlier this year, according to Bloomberg.

“I like not having conflicts and I think the possibility that one day we will have to make a very strange decision is not trivial,” he added when asked about his decision not to acquire shares in OpenAI.

OpenAI representatives did not immediately respond to the Post’s request for comment.

Last week, OpenAI introduced GPT Builder, which allows users to create custom chatbots called GPT.

Noting the launch of GPT, Altman told the Financial Times that OpenAI was working to build more autonomous tools that can perform increasingly advanced tasks and actions, such as running code, making payments, sending emails or filing claims.

“We will make these agents more and more powerful… and the actions will become more and more complex from here,” he told the outlet. “I think the amount of business value that will be gained from being able to do that across all categories is pretty good.”

OpenAI is also reportedly working on GPT-5, the next generation of its ChatGPT “big language model,” Altman said, although he did not disclose a timeline for its release.

Rumors on social media suggest that GPT-5 could be implemented as early as December 2023, although it’s difficult to know what to expect, even for Altman.

The AI ​​chief said it was difficult to predict exactly what new capabilities and abilities the model might have, according to the FT.

“Until we train that model, it’s like a fun guessing game for us,” he said. “We are trying to get better at this, because I think it is important from a security perspective to predict capabilities. But I can’t tell you exactly what it’s going to do that GPT-4 didn’t do.”

Meanwhile, Google also has its sights set on an advanced chatbot model, Character.AI, which allows users to chat with virtual versions of celebrities like Billie Eilish or anime characters, while creating their own chatbots and AI assistants.

It is free to use, but offers a subscription model that charges $9.99 per month for users who want to skip the virtual queue to access a chatbot, according to Reuters.

Google appears intrigued by the concept and is in talks with Character.AI founders and former Google employees Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas to structure the hefty investment in convertible notes, a source told Reuters.

The partnership would deepen the existing partnership that Character.AI already has with Google, according to the outlet, in which it uses Google’s cloud services and Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) to train models.

The post sought comments from Google and Character.AI.