Mira Murati: Artificial Intelligence and the Turn to Humans: A Conversation on OpenAI, Google, and ETH Zurich

Former OpenAI executive Mira Murati says it could take decades, but AI systems eventually will perform a wide range of cognitive tasks as well as humans do—a prospective technological milestone widely known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

“Right now, it feels quite achievable,” Murati said at WIRED’s The Big Interview event in San Francisco on Tuesday. In her first interview since she left Openai in September, she told Steven Levy that she isn’t concerned about the recent chatter about developing more powerful generative Artificial Intelligence models.

“Current evidence shows that progress will likely continue,” Murati said. There isn’t a lot of evidence to support the contrary. It is uncertain whether we need new ideas to get to AGI-level systems. I’m quite optimistic that the progress will continue.”

Murati started out in aerospace and then Elon Musk’s Tesla, where she worked on the Model S and Model X electric cars. She also oversaw product and engineering at virtual reality startup Leap Motion before joining OpenAI in 2018 and helping manage services such as ChatGPT and Dall-E. She became one of OpenAI’s top executives and was briefly in charge last year while board members wrestled with the fate of CEO Sam Altman.

According to the professional networking service, Zhai, Beyer, and Kolesnikov all reside in Switzerland. The city is home to ETH Zurich, a public research university with a globally renowned computer science department. Apple has also reportedly poached a number of AI experts from Google to work at “a secretive European laboratory in Zurich,” the Financial Times reported earlier this year.

Three senior computer vision and machine learning engineers from the rival company DeepMind will work in OpenAI’s new office in Switzerland. Openai executives told staff in an internal memo that Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai were joining the company to work on artificial intelligence models that can perform a range of tasks.

As they race to develop the most advanced AI models, OpenAI and its rivals are intensely competing to hire a limited pool of top researchers from around the world, often offering them annual compensation packages worth close to seven figures or more. It’s not unusual for the most sought-after talent to hop between companies.

All three of the newly hired researchers already work closely together, according to Beyer’s personal website. While he worked at DeepMind, Beyer appears to have kept a close eye on the research that OpenAI was publishing and public controversies the company was embroiled in, which he frequently posted about to his more than 70,000 followers on X. When CEO Sam Altman was briefly ousted from OpenAI by its board of directors last year, Beyer posted that “the most sensible” explanation for the firing he had read so far was that Altman was involved in too many other startups at the same time.

The first version of Openai’s text-to-image platform, Dall-E, was released in 2021. Its flagship chatbot ChatGPT, however, was initially only capable of interacting with text inputs. The company later added voice and image features as multimodal functionality became an increasingly important part of its product line and AI research. You can find the latest version of it directly within the chatgppt. Sora is a highly anticipated generative artificial intelligence video product but it has yet to be widely available.

Jensen Huang meets Paetongtarn Shinawatra: The last stop of Huang’s tour in Thailand to pitch the idea of AI for society

The only person who phoned in from outside the country was Huang. He was in Thailand, where Huang said he lived for five years as a kid and where, just today, he met with Paetongtarn Shinawatra, Thailand’s prime minister to talk about building “world-class AI infrastructure” in the country together.

It’s the latest stop of Huang’s whirlwind tour this year to pitch governments on the idea that they should forge their individual paths to the future by building their own AI infrastructure, processing their own national data, having their own AI systems, and, obviously, buying Nvidia chips for that purpose.

People are starting to realize the similarities of the energy and communications infrastructure with the digital intelligence infrastructure.

In a world where people are increasingly doubting the potential of AI, you can count on Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, to be the last one hyping up how AI will be the fundamental force that changes society.

One of the main tensions lies between the US and China, two leading technology powerhouses that are eager to take first place in the coming wave of technological changes. Nvidia is always at the center of the storm when the two countries collide.

Just this Monday, the Biden administration announced new restrictions that will ban the export of chip components and chip-making technologies to China. High-bandwidth memory, or HBM, is a component often used in customizedai chips. Nvidia’s H20 chips, which are designed to be sold to Chinese companies without violating the export controls, contain HBM chips. According to Chinese media reports, the restrictions this week forced Nvidia to stop taking Chinese orders for H20 chips as early as September.