The game-changing Microsoft-OpenAI partnership has truly emerged as a disruptive force in the world of artificial intelligence.
ChatGPT, launched at fag end of 2022, has been dominating the headlines for the past two months. Microsoft’s rival Google was caught off guard by the OpenAI product launch. It has now come up with its own version of the AI chatting tool ‘Bard’.
However, it hit a roadblock after giving incorrect answers about James Webb Space Telescope and this incident resulted in a bloodbath for the Sundar Pichai-led company in the share markets.
Following its release in November 2022, ChatGPT has gained popularity for producing a wide range of legitimate content, including academic essays, poems, and job applications. It also cleared the Minnesota University Law School exam in January 2023, along with the Wharton MBA exam, and the US law and medical licensing tests.
Not only that, over one million people have joined the waitlist to test out the new Bing Search with ChatGPT capabilities, according to Microsoft.
The new Bing, available to some users in a limited preview, was unveiled by Microsoft in February 2023.
Doubts have been raised among academics on whether the chatbot will be used in an unfair manner by the students to clear-write exams and assignments. In response, OpenAI has come up with ‘ZeroGPT’, which will help users to detect whether the text has been written by an AI programme and passed off as human-written, or it was actually written by a person.
ChatGPT surpassed Bitcoin among popular search terms, according to the Google Trends report for January 2023. The San Francisco–based startup—with 375 employees now has a reported valuation of roughly USD 30 billion.
While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been the company’s face in media, the real brain who is leading the tech firm’s AI game is the 35-year-old Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati.
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Who is Mira Murati?
- 35-year-old Mira Murati was born and brought up in San Francisco
- She did her Bachelor of Engineering from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College in the United States
- Mira Murati started her career as a Summer Analyst at Goldman Sachs and was the senior product manager of Model X at Tesla from 2013 to 2016
- She joined OpenAI in June 2018 as Vice-President of applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Partnerships. From there, she became the senior vice-president of research and product.
- In May 2022, Mira Murati took over as the California-based tech firm’s Chief Technology Officer and led the ChatGPT development.
- Mira Murati has led the team which came out with DALL-E, a project which enables users to create realistic art from strings of text
- Googling Mira Murati’s name won’t show anyone a Wikipedia profile on the 35-year-old, while on Twitter, she has close to 64,000 followers and the last post from that handle came on February 17, 2023, where the 35-year-old shared a link of an OpenAI article titled ‘How should AI systems behave, and who should decide?’
- During an interview, Mira Murati said that the song she feels identified with is Radiohead’s ‘Paranoid Android’ and her favourite book and movie are ‘Duino Elegies’ and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ respectively
- As per ‘Biography Reader’, Mira Murati’s hobbies include reading fiction, playing the piano, making chocolate and dancing salsa
- Mira Murati is Albanian with Indian lineage and speaks English, Italian and Albanian
Mira Murati’s point of view on ChatGPT and AI’s future
During an interview with Time Magazine, Mira Murati commented on ChatGPT clearing exams, “We weren’t anticipating this level of excitement from putting our child in the world. We, in fact, even had some trepidation about putting it out there. I’m curious to see the areas where it’ll start generating utility for people and not just novelty and pure curiosity.”
Talking about the chatbot’s current capabilities, she said, “Right now, it’s in the research review stage, so I don’t want to speak with high confidence on what problems it is solving. But I think that we can see that it has the potential to really revolutionize the way we learn. People are in classrooms of, say, 30 people. Everyone has different backgrounds, ways of learning, and everyone is getting basically the same curriculum. With tools like ChatGPT, you can endlessly converse with a model to understand a concept in a way that is catered to your level of understanding. It has immense potential to help us with personalized education.”
“[AI] can be misused, or it can be used by bad actors. So, then there are questions about how you govern the use of this technology globally. How do you govern the use of AI in a way that’s aligned with human values? It’s important for OpenAI and companies like ours to bring this into the public consciousness in a way that’s controlled and responsible. But we’re a small group of people and we need a ton more input in this system and a lot more input that goes beyond the technologies-—definitely regulators and governments and everyone else,” she elaborated, while speaking on the need for regulating the world of AI.
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