ON A BRIGHT MONDAY MORNING AT THE END OF JANUARY, THE SIX-PERSON LEADERSHIP TEAM BEHIND CHATGPT—THE MOST ADVANCED AI CHATBOT EVER TO BE DEPLOYED TO AMASS AUDIENCE—GATHERS FOR ITS WEEKLY MEETING.
IT'S TAKING PLACE IN OPENAI'S San Francisco headquarters, a former factory that's now home to 375 researchers, engineers, and policy specialists—the people responsible for creating the breakthrough technology. Past the building's imposing gate, through a courtyard edged by palm trees, and down the hall from a pebble fountain that emits a spalike burble, the team members arrive at a snug conference room, laptops in hand.
OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati takes a seat at the center of the table. Winter sunshine filters through a row of casement windows and a cluster of hanging plants. Murati, her hair drawn up into a haphazard ponytail, sips a glass of green tea and turns to a fresh page of a yellow legal pad, signaling for the ChatGPT team to launch into its update. There's a lot to talk about.
Beyond these walls, the conversation around ChatGPT has crescendoed from buzz to roar in the 55 days since its launch. Members of Congress, journalists, tech insiders, and early adopters have expressed awe, anxiety, and even existential dread about the potential of the service, which allows users to plug in keywords or phrases (“summarize Supreme Court rulings,” “in the style of Dr. Seuss”) and receive often mind-blowingly good results. The largest school district in the country has banned ChatGPT. Podcast hosts turned armchair AI quarterbacks have likened its significance to the iPhone. That very morning, Microsoft, which previously invested more than $1 billion in the almost eightyear-old startup, announced that it will further integrate OpenAI's tools into its products while pumping another reported $10 billion into the company. Meanwhile, ChatGPT's leaders, having rushed to release the product last fall, are grappling with its runaway success. Designed for research purposes, ChatGPT has now reached 100 million people, according to analytics firm Similarweb—and is showing some of its limitations. (OpenAI doesn't disclose user numbers.)
First on the team's meeting agenda is bullshit—or, to be precise, what the team is discovering about how ChatGPT balances accuracy and creativity in its responses. Rather than retrieve predetermined answers, ChatGPT produces a fresh reply to every user prompt—this is why it's known as generative AI and what makes it clever. But technology designed to
