The creator of ChatGPT is excited about the potential of ethical AI.

Mira Murati's preference for the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which explores the potential and limitations of technological development, is immensely telling. She loves the Radiohead song "Paranoid Android," which was influenced by Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Although Marvin the Paranoid Android in the book has an intellect the size of a planet, the menial tasks humans give him, like opening doors, boring and depress him. The song is from Radiohead's masterwork OK Computer, released in 1997. Adams also served as the inspiration for the album's title, which explores the alienation that comes with living in a technologically reliant society.

You're right if you think this article has a theme. These pieces of art predicted a future that San Francisco-based OpenAI and Murati, the CTO who oversees the company's research, product, and safety teams, are already working to build—and one that we now unwittingly inhabit.

A Rapid Ascent

Who is this Millennial technophile who holds the key to our future, then? Born in Albania, Murati immigrated to Canada at the age of 16 to enroll at the prestigious international school Pearson United World College. After graduating from Dartmouth, an Ivy League research university, Murati earned a degree in mechanical engineering.

Murati worked as an advanced concepts engineer for Zodiac Aerospace for a year after a brief stint at Goldman Sachs. However, in 2013, while working for three years at Tesla as a Senior Product Manager for the Model X, she saw the initial versions of the robotic assembly lines and AI-enabled autopilot driver assistance software that would later influence her career.

Before joining OpenAI in 2018, she oversaw the hardware strategy and the management of the reinforcement learning research team while directing the product and engineering teams at Leap Motion for two years in 2016.

Murati, however, became one of the foremost proponents of AI's game-changing technology after being appointed CTO in March 2022, six months before the company's much-anticipated AI products went on sale.

Humans have been creating and subsequently utilizing artificial intelligence since the 1950s, including in smart home appliances, chatbots, banking, and streaming, to mention a few. The generative-image program DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that can articulately respond to complicated queries like a human, were both released by OpenAI in September 2022. AI immediately sparked the public's interest. Additionally, it made the world aware of the AI revolution and the upcoming, (as of yet) unregulated new wave of technical advancements. But it appears that we do at the moment.

Innovative Technology

OpenAI has adopted a strategy of offering free public testing of its products while they are still in the feedback phase. As a result, OpenAI's traffic increased to a record-breaking 1.8 billion monthly visitors from February to April of this year. Currently, ChatGPT has more than 100 million users, and OpenAI's Codex product, which parses natural language and writes code in response, is poised to revolutionize how people use computers worldwide.

The tools also established Murati as a key figure in the global tech industry and created OpenAI the most well-known and dominant AI brand. She has already made appearances on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and in an article in Time.

Additionally, it appears that OpenAI has significantly outpaced Google's DeepMind AI project, which helped develop part of the technology that underpins ChatGPT. The New York Times reports that Google has issued a "code red" on the introduction of AI products and suggested a "green lane" to expedite the evaluation and mitigation of any risks.

Microsoft, a global leader in technology, has spent $10 billion on OpenAI and is reportedly aiming to integrate it into its well-known office suite and sell access to the tool to other companies. In June, Techcrunch learned that companies like Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive, and K2 Global had invested more than $300 million in OpenAI at a valuation of between US$27 billion and US$29 billion.

An ongoing project

Murati acknowledges to Time that, despite the hoopla, OpenAI's technology has some fundamental flaws that should make every student in the globe double-check their AI-inspired assignments.

"ChatGPT is essentially a large conversational model -- a big neural net that's been trained to predict the next word -- and the challenges with it are similar challenges we see with the base large language models: it may make up facts," said the researcher.

This type of innovation is referred to as hallucination in the IT sector; ChatGPT carries a warning that it may occasionally produce inaccurate information and that its knowledge cut-off is in 2021. Whether on purpose or not, Murati's beloved and data-fed chatbot is completely unaware of her.

The popularity of OpenAI has increased the urgency of debating AI's place in human lives.

When you consider that OpenAI was initially co-founded by Elon Musk (who left in 2018 due to a conflict of interest), President Greg Brockman, CEO Sam Altman, and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever as a research lab to combat "bad" AI and promote responsible use of the technology, testing tools in public is an interesting strategy.

However, OpenAI's success has increased the urgency of this debate about AI's place in our lives. Will it contribute to the eradication of difficult global problems like hunger, poverty, and climate change?

At the risk of appearing alarmist, would it even go beyond simply replacing human occupations and eventually wiping out humanity to usher in the next stage of Earth's evolution?

Controlling the Future

According to Murati, who thinks that AI needs a north star, the most important ethical or philosophical issue is still up for debate. It's critical that OpenAI and businesses like ours raise awareness of this issue in a controlled and responsible manner. We are a small group of people, so we need a lot more input from regulators, governments, and everyone else in this system in addition to feedback from the technology.

When speaking on a panel at CogX, a prestigious conference, and festival for AI and emerging technologies, she described the three AI-related topics of concern.

She listed three topics: "One is about misuse, one is about minimizing unintentional harms, and the third is about the people behind technology development, customer feedback, and product access."

"We offer some advice on how we approach these situations. It cannot be enforced. We are aware of that, but this is really just the beginning of a conversation and discussion about how to advance deployment and improve the dependability of these systems. It is a beginning step, and in my opinion, it also serves as a kind of evolving record as we gain more knowledge.

Murati is at the cutting edge of these discoveries. She most recently joined the board of Unlearn.AI, a San Francisco-based health firm where the use of AI is revolutionizing diagnosis, treatment, and healthcare.

. For instance, the business used artificial intelligence software to construct "digital twin" profiles of patients participating in clinical studies, possibly saving medication developers money and eliminating the need for placebo subjects.

It's critical that OpenAI and businesses like ours educate the public about this in a controlled and reasonable manner. (Mira Murati)

Although these applications seem promising, the future is yet uncertain. Will AI rule humanity as its master or as its slave? The queries posed are similar to those posed in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which focused on the first. In the narrative, a character requests that the computer give up control.