OpenAI recently held an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Reddit, where it addressed important questions about its progression in the AI landscape, roadmap, product release, and everything in between. This isn’t the first time the ChatGPT maker has held such a session. In November, the company held a similar session, during which CEO Sam Altman indicated that the AGI benchmark is achievable with current hardware.
AMA with OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Mark Chen, Kevin Weil, Srinivas Narayanan, Michelle Pokrass, and Hongyu Ren from r/OpenAI
The session included top executives at OpenAI, including CEO Sam Altman, CRO Mark Chen, CPO Kevin Weil, Engineering VP Srinivas Narayanan, API Research Lead Michelle Pokrass, and Research Lead Hongyu Ren.
While the interactive session has since been concluded, the executive shared many insights about OpenAI’s developmental plans, strategies, and potential launch dates for long-anticipated products. Here’s everything you need to know about OpenAI’s recent AMA session on Reddit:
Sam Altman addresses cost-friendly competition from DeepSeek
Over the past few months, DeepSeek has become the talk of the town in the AI industry. Admittedly, a research paper published by the Chinese startup touted its R1 V3-powered model’s capabilities, surpassing OpenAI’s proprietary 01 reasoning model across several benchmarks, including science, math, and coding, at a fraction of its developmental cost.
However, recent reports suggest that DeepSeek might have trained its model using Microsoft and OpenAI’s copyrighted data. A separate report suggests that the Chinese didn’t use $6 million to train its AI model. The firm reportedly spent up to $1.6 billion, including $944 million in operating and 50,000 NVIDIA GPUs.
Be that as it may, the emergence of DeepSeek has raised investor concern, especially around the exorbitant spending in the landscape. OpenAI and SoftBank placed a $500 billion bet on the Stargate project to facilitate the construction of data centers across the United States for its AI advances. But will this be enough to retain the US dominance in AI?
While Sam Altman touts Deepseek’s AI efforts as impressive, he claims OpenAI will “produce better models, but we will maintain less of a lead than we did in previous years.”
OpenAI’s Stargate vision and baseline on open-source AI models
Following OpenAI’s $500 billion pledge to its recently unveiled Stargate project has raised eyebrows, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who claimed the investors involved don’t have the money to facilitate the highlighted efforts. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff also weighed in, indicating Microsoft won’t use OpenAI’s tech in the future.
OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil highlighted the project’s importance to the firm as follows:
“Everything we’ve seen says that the more compute we have, the better the model we can build, and the more valuable the products we can make. We’re now scaling the models on two dimensions at once—larger pre-trains, and more RL/strawberry—and both take compute. So does serving products for hundreds of millions of users! And as move to more agentic products that are doing work for you continuously, that takes compute. So think of Stargate as our factory for turning power/GPUs into awesome stuff for you.”
Elsewhere, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted that the company has been on “the wrong side of history” and needs to figure out a different open-source strategy. “Not everyone at OpenAI shares this view, and it’s also not our current highest priority,” Altman added.
Following OpenAI’s round of funding from key investors, including Microsoft, SoftBank, NVIDIA, and others, which raised $6.6 billion and pushed the ChatGPT maker’s market cap to $157 billion, the company is under immense pressure to evolve into a for-profit entity. Failure to meet this threshold could subject it to outsider interference and hostile takeovers, with market analysts predicting a Microsoft acquisition within three years as investor interest in the AI bubble fades.
Former co-founder Elon Musk has filed two lawsuits against OpenAI, citing a stark betrayal of its founding mission and alleged involvement in racketeering activities.
OpenAI won’t raise the cost for its ChatGPT Plus tier
A user raised concern, asking OpenAI if it had any plans to raise the cost of its ChatGPT Plus tier from $20/month. Admittedly, the concerns aren’t entirely farfetched following multiple reports suggesting OpenAI could raise the cost for its proprietary AI models to a whopping $2,000/month amid bankruptcy claims. “That’s a price point for an employee, not a chatbot,” a user indicated. “The only way it would make any sense is if it was legit AGI.”
Despite launching ChatGPT Pro, a new subscription service costing $200/month for an AI model that thinks harder for complex queries, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil categorically indicated that there are no plans to raise the price for ChatGPT’s Plus subscription plan. “Actually, I’d like to reduce it over time,” added Altman.
OpenAI on security and US National government partnership
As you may know, OpenAI recently partnered with the US government to bolster security and safety for its AI advances. “Did you guys NOT see Terminator yet?” a concerned user asked. “One minor Hallucination and we all won’t be here to ask why it was done in the first place.”
OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil indicated:
“LOL. I’ve gotten to know these scientists and they are AI experts in addition to world-class researchers. They understand the power and the limits of the models, and I don’t think there’s any chance they just yolo some model output into a nuclear calculation. They’re smart and evidence-based and they do a lot of experimentation and data work to validate all their work.
But I DO think—and they have said—that they believe working with our o-series models will accelerate fundamental science and national security, and I’m very excited about that.”
Sam Altman wants AI that accelerates scientific discovery
“Let’s say it’s 2030 and you’ve just created a system most would call AGI. It aces every benchmark you throw at it, and it beats your best engineers and researchers in both speed and performance. What now? Is there a plan beyond “offer it on the website”?”
Responding to the question, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman indicated that the most important impact will be accelerating the rate of scientific discovery, which could potentially contribute to improving quality of life. Last year, Altman predicted superintelligence would trigger a 10x surge in scientific AI breakthroughs, making each year revolutionary as a decade.
Adding to that, OpenAI’s VP of Engineering, Srinivas Narayanan, indicated:
“The interface through which we interact with AI will change pretty fundamentally. Things will be more agentic. AI will continuously work on our behalf, on complex tasks, and on our goals in the background. They will check-in with us whenever it is useful. Robotics should also advance enough for them to do useful tasks in the real world for us.”
GPT-4o image generator could ship in “a couple of months”
A curious user immediately asked OpenAI about its potential plans to ship GPT-4o’s image generator. OpenAI’s Chief Product Officer, Kevin Weil, indicated that the company is currently in the product’s development phase and that it would be “worth the wait.” He further narrowed down the timeframe for the long-anticipated launch to “a couple of months.”
OpenAI’s announcement comes after Elon Musk unveiled Grok AI, often touted as “the most based and uncensored model of its class yet.” Copilot and ChatGPT user experience have been bashed, especially after subsequent updates that have seemingly capped their image generation capabilities due to heavy censorship. It’ll be interesting to see how OpenAI’s GPT-4o competes against Musk’s uncensored alternative.
More on the GPT-4o front. While OpenAI Research Lead Hongyu Ren didn’t categorically spell out the company’s plan for the model, Ren stated the company wasn’t done with the 4o series yet, which could include upgrades for custom GPTs and the ability to select the models when interacting with GPTs.
However, the company won’t make any API cost cuts beyond the changes effected in August 2024. Instead, the ChatGPT maker recommends o4-mini as a cost-effective alternative.
