Sam Altman has acknowledged that he heavily relied on advice from his friend, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, to grow OpenAI after ChatGPT became a global sensation. In a joint interview with Mr Chesky at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the OpenAI CEO mentioned that while many people offered help once ChatGPT gained popularity in late 2022, Mr Chesky was the only one who truly pitched in, CNBC Make It reported.

“Everything just went crazy for me,” Mr Altman said. “Brian would sit down with me for about three hours every other week and provide a list of things I needed to do. He’d point out where I was behind, what I was messing up, and what I needed to proactively consider.”

Five days after ChatGPT launched to the public, it surpassed 1 million users. By January 2023, the platform had 100 million monthly active users, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, according to CNBC Make It. As the Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence company experienced rapid growth, Chesky became a close confidant, Altman noted. Mr Chesky was “almost always right,” Altman added, saying, “I learned to just always shut up and follow the advice.”

Elaborating on the impact of Mr Chesky’s advice on OpenAI’s business, Altman mentioned that his friend guided him on hiring decisions and how to “map” out the company’s strategy.

Recently, Mr Chesky pointed out that Mr Altman was “probably not thinking enough about” the political consequences of the company’s generative AI technology, the OpenAI CEO said.

New Delhi:

OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, has said it acted within 24 hours to disrupt “deceptive” use of artificial intelligence (AI) in a covert operation that sought to influence the ongoing Lok Sabha elections.

This influence campaign, called “Zero Zeno”, was run by STOIC, a political campaign management firm in Israel.

The threat actors attempted to leverage OpenAI’s powerful language models for tasks like generating comments, articles, social media profiles that criticised the ruling BJP and praised the Congress, the company led by CEO Sam Altman said.

“In May, the network began generating comments that focused on India, criticised the ruling BJP party and praised the opposition Congress party. We disrupted some activity focused on the Indian elections less than 24 hours after it began,” OpenAI said.

OpenAI said it banned a cluster of accounts operated from Israel that were being used to generate and edit content for an influence operation that spanned X, Facebook, Instagram, websites, and YouTube.

“This operation targeted audiences in Canada, the United States and Israel with content in English and Hebrew. In early May, it began targeting audiences in India with English-language content,” the company said.

Responding to the report, the BJP called it a “dangerous threat” to the democracy.

“It is absolutely clear and obvious that @BJP4India was and is the target of influence operations, misinformation and foreign interference, being done by and/or on behalf of some Indian political parties,” said Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar.

“This is very dangerous threat to our democracy. It is clear vested interests in India and outside are clearly driving this and needs to be deeply scrutinized/investigated and exposed. My view at this point is that these platforms could have released this much earlier, and not so late when elections are ending,” he added.

It is absolutely clear and obvious that @BJP4India was and is the target of influence operations, misinformation and foreign interference, being done by and/or on behalf of some Indian political parties.

This is very dangerous threat to our democracy. It is clear vested… https://t.co/e78pbEuHwe

— Rajeev Chandrasekhar (Modiyude Kutumbam) (@Rajeev_GoI) May 31, 2024

OpenAI said it has disrupted five covert operations in the last three months that sought to use our models in support of deceptive activity across the internet. “Our investigations into suspected covert influence operations (IO) are part of a broader strategy to meet our goal of safe AI deployment.”

San Francisco:

An OpenAI team devoted to mitigating the long-term dangers of super-smart computers was leaderless on Friday after two high-profile figures left the company.

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and “superalignment” team co-leader Jan Leike announced their departures from the ChatGPT-maker last week, and US media reported that remaining members of the group have either left or been reassigned to other parts of the San Francisco-based company.

The apparent dismantling of an OpenAI team focused on keeping sophisticated artificial intelligence under control comes as such technology comes under increased scrutiny from regulators and fears mount regarding its dangers.

“OpenAI must become a safety-first AGI (artificial general intelligence) company,” Leike wrote Friday in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

Leike called on all OpenAI employees to “act with the gravitas” warranted by what they are building.

It’s been such a wild journey over the past ~3 years. My team launched the first ever RLHF LLM with InstructGPT, published the first scalable oversight on LLMs, pioneered automated interpretability and weak-to-strong generalization. More exciting stuff is coming out soon.

— Jan Leike (@janleike) May 17, 2024

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman responded to Leike’s post with one of his own, thanking him for his work at the company and saying he was sad to see Leike leave.

“He’s right we have a lot more to do,” Altman said. “We are committed to doing it.”

Altman promised more on the topic in the coming days.

Sutskever said on X that he was leaving after almost a decade at OpenAI, whose “trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous.”

“I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial,” he added, referring to computer technology that seeks to perform as well as — or better than — human cognition.

Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, sat on the board that voted to remove fellow chief executive Altman in November last year.

The ousting threw the San Francisco-based startup into a tumult, with the OpenAI board hiring Altman back a few days later after staff and investors rebelled.

OpenAI last week released a higher-performing and even more human-like version of the artificial intelligence technology that underpins ChatGPT, making it free to all users.

“It feels like AI from the movies,” Altman said in a blog post.

Altman has previously pointed to the Scarlett Johansson character in the movie “Her,” where she voices an AI-based virtual assistant dating a man, as an inspiration for where he would like AI interactions to go.

The day will come when “digital brains will become as good and even better than our own,” Sutskever said during a talk at a TED AI summit in San Francisco late last year.

“AGI will have a dramatic impact on every area of life.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

File photo of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Israeli cyber security start-up Apex, which focuses on protecting the rapid use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, said on Thursday it received an undisclosed investment from OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman.

In all, Apex raised $7 million in a seed funding round led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Index Ventures, Mr. Altman and others, it said. Mr. Altman did not immediately comment.

Apex said it had been running trials with a number of Fortune 500 companies and investment firms and was close to finalising paid contracts. The new funds will go toward accelerating product development, hiring workers and marketing, the company said.

With demand growing for AI tools — including OpenAI’s ChatGPT — that help to complete tasks much faster, their users are seeking ways to protect their own data and prevent threats and inappropriate data from entering their systems.

“There is a whole new segment of threats and risks using AI models. It starts with data leakage and problems on the data side. It goes to privacy, compliance and what comes back into an organisation,” Matan Derman, Apex’s CEO, told Reuters.

That marked a pivotal moment for the cyber security industry, which until has focused on prevention and blocking unwanted access, he said.

“We started Apex to build the extra layers of security that’s needed for enterprises to adopt (AI),” he said. “We will try to take this as far as we can.”

Israel is a global leader in cyber security with hundreds of startups.

Ten months ago, Mr. Derman co-founded Apex with Tomer Avni, whom he met when both served as officers in the Israeli military’s elite 8200 intelligence unit. Since then the company has been operating in so-called stealth mode, working in secrecy with selected companies.

“Every board, every CEO, every investor and every entrepreneur is talking about AI and how they can leverage AI,” Mr. Avni said. “So, the need for security is much more imminent.”

Mr. Avni said that AI is the latest in major shifts in technology, that began with the emergence of personal computers, and then moved to networks and the cloud – with each requiring added security.

“AI is probably going to be bigger than all these (prior) revolutions,” he said, “because AI is just everywhere.”

New Delhi:

Sam Altman-run OpenAI has hired Pragya Misra as its first employee in India. Sources confirmed to IANS on Friday that Ms Misra has been appointed to lead public policy affairs and partnerships in the country.

She has served as the Director of Public Affairs for Truecaller, where she has collaborated closely with government ministries, investors, key stakeholders, and media partners.

Prior to that, she worked for three years with Meta Platforms.

She also led WhatsApp’s campaign against misinformation in 2018 and has worked with Ernst & Young as well as the Royal Danish Embassy in Delhi. Ms Misra received her MBA from the International Management Institute in 2012.

She graduated in commerce from Delhi University and holds a Diploma in Bargaining and Negotiations from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

She is also a podcaster and Instagram influencer with a follower base of 35,000.

She hosts the Pragyaan Podcast (@pragyaan_podcast), covering topics such as meditation and consciousness.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Sam Altman is rejoining the board of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI along with three new directors, as the startup tries to move past his sudden ouster in November that shocked the tech industry.

Altman had returned as CEO of OpenAI just four days after his firing with a new board made up of Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and former co-CEO of Salesforce Bret Taylor.

The board will now expand with the addition of Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Nicole Seligman, former president of Sony Entertainment, and Instacart CEO Fidji Simo.

Here are more details about the new members:

Fidji Simo

Simo serves as chief executive and chair of Instacart. She also sits on the board of Shopify.

She spent a decade at social media giant Meta Platforms, including as the head of Facebook from 2019 until 2021.

She also serves as president of the Metrodora Foundation. Simo is a co-founder of the Metrodora Institute, a multidisciplinary medical clinic and research foundation, which she co-founded.

Sue Desmond-Hellman

A former board member of Meta, Desmond-Hellman was the CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation from 2014-20. She is also a former director of Proctor and Gamble’s board and currently serves on the board of U.S. drugmaker Pfizer and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

She was professor and chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco from 2009 to 2014, the first woman to hold the position. She has also served as president of product development at the biotechnology firm Genentech.

Nicole Seligman

The lawyer is a board member at Paramount Global, MeiraGTx and Intuitive Machines. She also served on the board of Viacom through 2019, when it merged with CBS to form Paramount, then called ViacomCBS.

She has held several leadership positions at Japanese company Sony including president of Sony Entertainment from 2014-16 and president of Sony’s America business.

She was a partner in litigation practice at American law firm Williams & Connolly LLP. She also served as a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court of the United States.

San Francisco:

CEO Sam Altman will return to the board of OpenAI, the company said on Friday, just months after a boardroom dustup that saw him fired and rehired by the company behind ChatGPT.

Altman was also found to have been wrongly fired in an internal investigation that was launched in the days after his chaotic dismissal last year, the company said.

Altman will join the board with three other new directors: Sue Desmond-Hellmann, a former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Nicole Seligman, a former president of Sony Entertainment; and Fidji Simo, CEO of Instacart.

They will join Ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who joined in the immediate aftermath of the November 2023 tumult.

Microsoft also gained an observer seat on OpenAI’s board at the time, a move that drew criticism and a lawsuit from Elon Musk earlier this week, who helped found OpenAI in 2015 before leaving the project.

“I am excited to welcome Sue, Nicole, and Fidji to the OpenAI Board of Directors,” said  Bret Taylor, chair of the OpenAI board.

“Their experience and leadership will… ensure that we pursue OpenAI’s mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” he added.

Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo is the sole holdover from the old board that had taken the decision to fire Altman.

Altman has become the face of the recent artificial intelligence explosion that burst onto the scene with his decision to release ChatGPT in November 2022.

But in a shock move, the company’s board summarily fired Altman without any clear reason given, sparking the threat of a mass exodus by the company’s 700 strong employees, who stuck by their star CEO.

Microsoft, the tech giant with major investments in OpenAI, offered to hire those leaving the AI company, forcing a change of mind by its board, which reinstated Altman after a few days of chaos.

The board members behind Altman’s shortlived ouster, left their roles.

– ‘Right leaders’ –

In the aftermath of the events, the new fangled board launched an internal investigation on what happened with a law firm.

The results of that investigation “unanimously concluded that Altman and president Greg Brockman “are the right leaders for OpenAI,” Taylor said in a sperate statement.

The company said the probe, handled by outside firm WilmerHale, “reviewed more than 30,000 documents; conducted dozens of interviews, including of members of OpenAI’s prior Board, OpenAI executives, advisors to the prior Board, and other pertinent witnesses…”

OpenAI remains the standard bearer of generative AI, the technology that can generate human level texts and images in seconds.

But it faces increased rivalry from Google, Meta and other startups, including Anthropic, Musk’s xAI and French company Mistral.

OpenAI is now caught up in a legal battle with Musk, who accuses Altman and top executives of betraying the original nonprofit status of the company.

Musk’s suit alleges that OpenAI was now effectively a subsidiary of Microsoft, arguing that this was breach of contract.

Microsoft’s embrace of AI, and OpenAI’s technology in particular, has made it the world’s biggest company by market capitalization.

OpenAI is also being sued by The New York Times for allegedly illegally using its articles to train the models that power ChatGPT and other applications.

The Times believes that ChatGPT has the capability to become a substitute for its journalism and was built from scraping its content from the internet without payment or permission.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Billionaire Elon Musk recently sued OpenAI and its chief executive Sam Altman, the firm behind ChatGPT, accusing them of breaching contractual agreements made when he helped start the ChatGPT-maker in 2015. He alleged that they violated the artificial intelligence startup’s founding mission by putting profit ahead of benefiting humanity. The Microsoft-backed company’s focus on seeking profits breaks that agreement, lawyers for Elon Musk said in the lawsuit. Notably, Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but stepped down from the company’s board in 2018.

Now, the Tesla and SpaceX Chief has stated that he would drop the lawsuit against OpenAI if they agree to change their name to “‘ClosedAI”. Mr Musk said in a post on X, “Change your name to ClosedAI and I will drop the lawsuit.” In subsequent posts, he said, “OpenAI needs to stop living a lie.”

To ClosedAI and I will drop the lawsuit

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 6, 2024

Further, he edited a picture of Sam Altam wearing a guest ID Card and changed the details of the card with the words “ClosedAI” alongside OpenAI’s logo.

Fixed it pic.twitter.com/KPtYLsJU3h

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 6, 2024

This comes as the AI company released a set of private emails with Elon Musk in response to the lawsuit on March 6. “We’re sad that it’s come to this with someone whom we’ve deeply admired — someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI’s mission without him,” they said in a blog post.

In 2017, “we all understood we were going to need a lot more capital to succeed at our mission — billions of dollars per year, which was far more than any of us, especially Elon, thought we’d be able to raise as the non-profit,” they said.

As per the blog and emails, Mr Musk suggested that the AI company be attached “to Tesla as its cash cow”. However, when the OpenAI team refused he “soon chose to leave OpenAI, saying that our probability of success was 0,” adding he planned to build an AGI competitor within Tesla.

“When he left in late February 2018, he told our team he was supportive of us finding our own path to raising billions of dollars,” OpenAI added.

New Delhi:

OpenAI Founder and CEO Sam Altman witnessed his net worth touch the $2 billion mark, as per the Bloomberg Billionaire Index. However, despite his sitting at the helm of the AI research firm, the company’s financial success has no contribution to the aforementioned figure.

This is the first time the index has evaluated the fortune of the 38-year-old, who became the face of artificial intelligence through his role as CEO of OpenAI—which was recently valued at $86 billion.

As per a Bloomberg report, Altman has repeatedly claimed that he does not own equity in the company. In fact, the report added that much of his traceable wealth is in a network of VC funds and start-up investments.

Additionally, his wealth is set to grow with the initial public offering of Reddit, where he’s among the largest shareholders.

Meanwhile, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has sued OpenAI and Sam Altman, accusing him of breaching contractual agreements that were made when Mr Musk helped found the ChatGPT-maker in 2015.

A lawsuit filed on Thursday in San Francisco stated that Altman along with OpenAI’s co-founder Greg Brockman originally approached Musk to make an open source.

The lawsuit added that open-source assured that it would develop artificial intelligence technology for the “benefit of humanity”.

In the lawsuit, the Tesla CEO alleged that the Microsoft-backed company’s focus on seeking profits breaks that agreement.

It must be noted that back in 2015, Musk co-founded OpenAI. However, the billionaire stepped down from the company’s board in 2018. Later, in October 2022, Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion.

The chatbot from OpenAI, ChatGPT, became the fastest-growing software application in the world within just six months of its launch in November 2022.

Not only this, ChatGPT also sparked the launch of its rival chatbots from companies like Microsoft, Alphabet and a group of start-ups that tapped the hype to secure billions in funding.

Ever since ChatGPT debuted, several companies have adopted it for a wide range of tasks. This includes summarising documents, writing computer code, setting off a race among Big Tech companies and launching their own offerings based on generative AI.