Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI (Courtesy: a16z podcast)

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has now described the time of launch of ChatGPT has a defining moment for the company. Altman called ChatGPT as the early discovery of scaling laws for language models a ‘scientific windfall’ which shaped the complete strategy for OpenAI. Speaking at a recent podcast hosted by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), OpenAI CEO admitted to the fact that the breakthrough of ChatGPT felt like a stroke of luck and its unlikely to be repeated. Speaking at the interview, Altman recalled the early days of ChatGPT, saying, “We stumbled on this one giant secret… and that felt like such an incredible triumph.” Altman further explained that the discovery of scaling laws — the principle that larger models trained with more data perform significantly better provided a roadmap to OpenAI which helped in transforming its research direction.“When we got the reasoning model breakthrough, I also thought that we were never going to get another one like that. We’ll never get that lucky again,” Altman added. Despite this, Altman noted that the technology has continued to outperform expectations, surprising even its creators.

OpenAI’s next big bet

Altman emphasised that moving ahead, OpenAI is working on a major expansion of its AI infrastructure footprint. The company said that it is entering into partnerships with industry heavyweights including Foxconn, AMD, Nvidia, and Oracle to build out massive computing capacity.“We have decided that it is time to make a very aggressive infrastructure bet,” Altman said. “I have never been more confident in the research roadmap… and the economic value that will come from using those models. But to make the bet at this scale, we need the major chunk of the industry to support it.”As reported by Financial Times, the combined value of OpenAI’s recent deals now stands at $1 trillion, nearly double the company’s current valuation of $500 billion.Altman also explained that the idea of OpenAI is to built on a “vertical stack of things” where research leads to great products, and infrastructure helps in further research. The company’s long-term goal, he said, is to become “people’s personal AI subscription.”He also signalled that the limits of large language models are still far away: “If LLM-based stuff can get far enough, then it can do better research than all of OpenAI put together.”

Recent OpenAI deals

OpenAI’s aggressive infrastructure push has already led to several landmark agreements: