Mira Murati, a former OpenAI executive, says it could take decades, but AI systems will end up performing a wide range of cognitive tasks as well as humansan upcoming technological milestone that is widely known as artificial general intelligence or AGI.
“Right now, it seems pretty doable,” Murati said at WIRED’s The Big Interview event in San Francisco on Tuesday. In her first interview since stepping down as OpenAI’s CTO in September, Murati told WIRED’s Steven Levy that she’s not overly concerned about recent rumors in the AI industry that the development of more powerful generative models is proving complicated.
“There’s not much evidence to the contrary. Whether we need new ideas to get to AGI-level systems, that’s uncertain. I’m quite optimistic and think progress will continue.”
These statements reflect his continued interest in finding a way to bring increasingly capable AI systems to the world, despite having parted ways with OpenAI. Reuters reported in October that Murati is founding his own AI company to develop its own models and could raise more than $100 million in venture capital financing. On Tuesday, Murati declined to provide further details about the company.
“I’m figuring out what it’s going to be like,” he simply said, “I’m working on it.”
Murati started in aerospace and then at Elon Musk’s Tesla, where he worked on the Model S and Model startup VR developer Leap Motion before joining OpenAI in 2018 and helping run services like ChatGPT and Dall-E. She became a top executive at OpenAI and was briefly in charge last year as board members wrestled with the fate of CEO Sam Altman.
When Murati resigned, Altman thanked her for her support during difficult times and described her as a key player in OpenAI’s growth.
Murati did not publicly specify the reasons for his departure from OpenAI, except that he considered it was the right time to pursue his own interests. Dozens of OpenAI’s early employees have left the nonprofit in recent years, some out of frustration with Altman’s growing interest in generating revenue rather than pursuing purely academic research. Murati told WIRED’s Levy that there has been “too much obsession” with results and not enough with the essence of AI development.
He pointed out as important areas to continue the work on the production of synthetic data to train models and the growing investment in computing infrastructure to enhance them. According to her, advances in these fields will one day allow artificial intelligence. But not everything is technology: “This technology is not intrinsically good or bad,” he clarified, “it has two sides.” It is up to society, Murati said, to continue collectively orienting models towards good, so that we are well prepared for the day when artificial general intelligence arrives.
Article originally published in WIRED. Adapted by Mauricio Serfatty Godoy.
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