OpenAI’s Revolution For The World
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (R) greets OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (L). PHOTOGRAPH: JUSTIN SULLIVAN/Wired
OpenAI has already taken the world by storm, with its era-defining ChatGPT, which has inspired a lot of major tech companies to follow in its footsteps. OpenAI’s thrusting of AI into the public consciousness has indirectly allowed it to indirectly power the stock market for nearly a year.
Since the beginning of the year, OpenAI has yet again managed to reach what no other has reached before. Recently, OpenAI has unveiled its voice-generating application, Voice Engine. It represents an entry into a field of AI inhabited mostly by startups, and it can emulate your voice to a high degree of perfection with only a 15-second sample of your voice. This has raised concerns about the possibility of deepfakes, especially given the current volatile political climate in the United States.
Another recent service called Sora by ChatGPT was recently used to create an entire short film - a revolutionary development for both the AI world and the film industry, further opening the possibility for the direct intervention of AI in filmmaking. This is especially noteworthy given that Hollywood has, less than a year ago, seen strikes by its workers unseen in modern history that were partially due to the long-running dispute over the role of AI in entertainment production. The demonstration of the ability of generative AI to create films, lays bare the challenge for the people working in Hollywood: will human creators be able to compete with AI? What role will humans play in film entertainment in the future, if at all?
OpenAI has recently announced plans for a $100 billion AI-powered data center with Microsoft, 100 times more expensive than the most expensive data centers around the world, which will house a supercomputer powered by millions of AI chips.
And most importantly of all, the next version of ChatGPT can be released as early as the middle of this year, meaning further improvements for the chatbot whose popularity is on the upswing. This upswing is most evident in the workplace, where the percentage of adults at work who use ChatGPT increased from 12% to 20% in seven months.
These recent developments represent a bold endeavor by OpenAI to fundamentally remake the society that surrounds us. Take the effect of Sora on movie and video production for example. While some envision disaster for certain industries, like the Hollywood workers that went on strike, such rapid developments can also evoke imagery of a future where the means of producing art and entertainment are democratized. Anyone can have their artistic ideas turned into reality. But it also has its downsides-people could utilize such technologies to create entire events out of thin air-just like how people made fake Biden robocalls with AI. For example, they could recreate fake clips of politicians and public figures saying things that they never actually said, creating chaos and confusion amongst the populace.
The voice generator technology by OpenAI can facilitate communication in the workplace. For example, AI-powered work phones can allow people to take multiple calls at once by letting people insert prompts to convert into actual dialogue.
Sam Altman at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January. (Source: Reuters)
More immediately, this amounts to more fuel for the stock market, which has been running on AI since mid-year last year. Though Nvidia might be considered overvalued by some, there are plenty of other opportunities for investors that want to take advantage of the AI fever. Apple, which has struggled recently amid an antitrust lawsuit and setbacks due to the failure of its self-driving car project, presents a decent opportunity because of its longstanding track record of revolutionizing existing products that can boost the upside of its pivot towards generative AI.