Rarely has a technology sparked such intense discussion as ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence (AI)-based chatbot. The brain behind it and co-founder of OpenAI, Sam Altman, visited TUM on May 25th, 2023. In the Audimax, he explained the reasons for its success, why ChatGPT is not an open source technology, and how it could be regulated.
After less than half an hour, the 1,100-seat Audimax was sold out for the 38-year-old's only public event in Germany during his European tour. Under questioning from Reinhard Heckel, professor of machine learning, Sam Altman, along with OpenAI developer Johannes Heidecke, recounted the evolution of the language model to its current fourth version. "Even with GPT-3, the whole company wasn't convinced," Altman said. The key to its success, he said, is its natural language chat capability, which provides an even better human-computer interface than the touchscreen. However, ChatGPT is still misunderstood as a large database, he said.
Altman explained why OpenAI made the technology available to the public early on, following a "show, don't tell" approach: "We feel strongly that we should educate the world about it and give people time to gradually adapt to the technology”. That way, he said, there can be a discussion about how to deal with artificial intelligence. This, he said, is better than keeping technologies secret in the lab for a long time because it would supposedly scare people into releasing them too soon.
Read full article here: https://www.mgt.tum.de/our-stories-with-impact/stories/ceo-of-openai-sam-altman-discusses-chatgpt-at-tum
