‘After Nagasaki and Hiroshima [atomic bombs], it took 18 years to get to a treaty over test bans … We don’t have that kind of time,’ said former Google CEO.
Big tech companies’ full commitment to developing artificial intelligence (AI), even enabling AI to “see” and “speak” to the human world, has led to a growing concern over humans being controlled by technology.
Ilya Sutskever, the co-founder of OpenAI, made a significant announcement on May 15, officially declaring that he was leaving the company where he had worked for nearly ten years.
“I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI [artificial general intelligence] that is both safe and beneficial under the leadership of @sama (Sam Altman), @gdb (Greg Brockman), @miramurati (Mira Murati) and now, under the excellent research leadership of @merettm (Jakub Pachocki). It was an honor and a privilege to have worked together, and I will miss everyone dearly,” he wrote in a post on the social media platform X.
After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI. The company’s trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous, and I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial under the leadership of @sama, @gdb, @miramurati and now, under the…
— Ilya Sutskever (@ilyasut) May 14, 2024
The news sent shockwaves through the tech industry. In November 2023, due to AI safety issues, Mr. Sutskever and other board members joined forces to oust OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, who was briefly expelled from OpenAI but returned and removed Mr. Sutskever and several board members, restructuring the board to be more aligned with his vision.
“This departure highlights severe conflicts within OpenAI’s leadership regarding AI safety. Although Sutskever and Leike’s wish to develop an ethically aligned AGI is commendable, such an endeavor requires substantial moral, temporal, financial, and even political support,” Jin Kiyohara, a Japanese computer engineer, told The Epoch Times.
Google & OpenAI Competition Intensifies
On May 14, one day before Mr. Sutskever announced his departure, OpenAI unveiled a higher-performance AI model based on GPT-4, named GPT-4o, where “o” stands for “omni,” indicating its comprehensive capabilities.
The GPT-4o model can respond in real-time to mixed inputs of audio, text, and images. At the launch event, OpenAI’s Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati stated, “We are looking at the future of interaction between ourselves and machines.”
In several videos released by OpenAI, people can be seen interacting with AI in real time through their phone cameras. The AI can observe and provide feedback on the surroundings, answer questions, perform real-time translation, tell jokes, or even mock users, with speech patterns, tones, and reaction speeds almost indistinguishable from a real person.
