Q&A: OpenAI CTO Mira Murati on Shepherding ChatGPT

OpenAI was building a reputation in the artificial intelligence field but wasn’t a household name when Mira Murati joined the nonprofit research lab in 2018.

Soon after, the San Francisco lab started a major transformation. It turned itself into a business that’s attracted worldwide attention as the maker of ChatGPT.

Now its chief technology officer, Murati leads OpenAI’s research, product and safety teams. She’s led the development and launch of its AI models including ChatGPT, the image-generator DALL-E and the newest, GPT-4.

She spoke about AI safeguards and the company’s vision for the futuristic concept of artificial general intelligence, known as AGI. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: WHAT DOES ARTIFICIAL GENERAL INTELLIGENCE MEAN FOR OPENAI?

A: By artificial general intelligence, we usually mean highly autonomous systems that are capable of producing economic output, significant economic output. In other words, systems that can generalize across different domains. It’s human-level capability. OpenAI’s specific vision around it is to build it safely and figure out how to build it in a way that’s aligned with human intentions, so that the AI systems are doing the things that we want them to do, and that it maximally benefits as many people out there as possible, ideally everyone.

Q: IS THERE A PATH BETWEEN PRODUCTS LIKE GPT-4 AND AGI?