SAN FRANCISCO: The dizzying investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure do not constitute a bubble but rather represent today’s “new normal” to meet skyrocketing user demand, Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s de facto number two, said on Monday.
The French-born executive made her comments in an interview with AFP, her first since taking up her role as chief operating officer of OpenAI’s applications, including its flagship model ChatGPT.
In the past few weeks, her company, under the leadership of CEO Sam Altman, has made a series of huge investments in data centres and AI chips, despite no real signs that the fast-emerging AI business is close to breaking even.
The answers were lightly edited for length and clarity.
Is the AI investment frenzy a bubble right now?
What I am seeing here is a massive investment in compute (or computing power), with us meeting that need for computing power so incredibly badly for a lot of use cases that people want. [Video AI generator] Sora is a great example right now – there’s much more demand than we can serve.
From that perspective, I really do not see that as a bubble. I see that as a new normal, and I think the world is going to switch to realising that computing power is the most strategic resource.
What do you say to those who fret over AI’s dangers?
I see my job as really making sure that the good side of this technology happens and we mitigate the bad side.
Take mental health, for example. I’m hearing tonnes of users say that they go to ChatGPT for advice in tough moments where they may not have other people to talk to. Many people can’t afford to go to a therapist.
I talk to a lot of parents who are telling me: God, I got this really awesome advice that helped me unlock a situation with my child. But at the same time, we need to make sure that the model behaves as expected.
On mental health, we have announced a very robust roadmap. We started with parental controls. We have plans to launch age prediction: if we can predict that the user is a teenager, we give them a model that is less permissive than we would give to an adult.
Jobs are also very much on my mind, and it’s a similar approach. AI is going to create a lot of jobs, like prompt engineering, that absolutely did not exist before. At the same time, there are some professions that are going to be directly impacted, and we see our role as helping with the transition.
What are the next steps toward intelligent AI?
I think the breakthroughs are about models understanding your goals and helping accomplish them proactively.
Not just give you a good answer to a question, not just have a dialogue, but actually tell you, ‘Oh, okay, you’re telling me that you want to spend more time with your wife. Well, there might be some weekend getaways that would be helpful, and I know it’s a lot to plan, so I’ve already done all the planning for you and I’ve already made some reservations. Just tap one button to approve and everything gets done.’
We’re still very early, but we’re on that journey to capture that.
In San Francisco, you sometimes hear: ‘America innovates, China copies, Europe regulates’
As a European, every time I hear this saying, my heart breaks a bit. I think there has certainly been a tendency in Europe to focus on regulation a little too much.
On China, we continue to be extremely focused on continuing to have a lead, because we see China continuing to invest heavily in being competitive – whether in terms of innovation or in terms of computing – and so we think it’s incredibly important to continue investing across a democratic bloc to advance AI that has these [democratic] values.
Do you let your child use ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is not supposed to be for under 13, but my kid is 10 – I still let her use it under supervision.
It’s magical to see what she’s able to create. Just this weekend, she was telling me about creating a new business. She was using ChatGPT to make banners for the new business, to create taglines.
In our childhood, we couldn’t turn our imagination into something real that fast. And I see that really giving her superpowers, where she thinks anything is possible. – AFP
