Open AI CEO Sam Altman chats with Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott at Microsoft Build.
Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET
The past two weeks have seen back-to-back announcements from OpenAI And Google, and now it’s Microsoft’s turn. OpenAI is a key partner in Microsoft’s AI journey, having lent its ChatGPT platform technology to the tech giant. As a result, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made a surprise appearance at the company’s annual developer conference, Microsoft Build.
On Tuesday, at the conclusion of the opening keynote, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott invited Altman to join him on stage to share his insights on the company’s recent AI developments and its innovations. what’s going to happen. To start the conversation, Scott invited Altman to share what surprised him most about AI over the past year.
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“I’ve never seen a technology adopted so quickly in such a meaningful way—what people are building, how people are finding ways to do things we never thought possible.” can—that’s why having an API that’s done is really fun to see,” Altman said.
OpenAI provides a series of APIs that developers can incorporate into their existing projects, opening up many new AI applications that benefit consumers everywhere. Altman shared that OpenAI values the work of developers and that the company has purposefully built APIs that are convenient for them.
“More like this [the API] It could just be a layer that’s integrated into every layer, every service, the better, and we’ve tried to make it so that if you want to add intelligence to whatever you’re doing, Any product, any service, we make it easy,” Altman said.
As for the future of AI, Scott prompted Altman to share — without revealing explicit details — what the public should look forward to most.
“The most important thing sounds as boring and obvious and cliché as I can say, but I think it’s actually much deeper than it sounds,” Altman said. “The most important thing is that models will get smarter—generally across the board.”
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Altman invited the audience to consider the growth that occurred between GPT 3 to 3.5 to 4: that each model became smarter, more powerful, more secure, and more useful. According to Altman, further developments will bring similar growth with greater intelligence and utility.
As for the specifics of what the public should expect from future OpenAI models, Altman shared that the company is interested in speed, cost, and multimodality, pointing to the fact that GPT-4 has reduced halving both token price and latency, while the recently released GPT-4o introduced Voice Mode.
Before concluding, Altman offers advice to developers during these unprecedented times in AI, encouraging them to follow the momentum of major platform changes the industry is seeing. He compares it to the developments that followed the explosion of mobile phones and the emergence of the Internet.
“My biggest advice is that this is a special time and take advantage of it,” Altman said. “This is not the time to put off what you planned to do or wait for the next thing.”
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At Microsoft Build, Microsoft continued to leverage OpenAI models to optimize its own services, while also announcing the general availability of GPT-4o, which OpenAI just launched last week, in Azure AI .
