Sam Altman AI Tour, and Open AI vs Tech Mahindra Controversy
A brief overview of Sam Altman's tour and his controversy in India
Image Source: indiatimes.com
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is doing a worldwide tour.
On this tour, he met with OpenAI users, developers, and policymakers, as well as interacted with people who hold interested in AI. The main focus of his tour was to engage with the developers and policymakers on the matter of AI development and regulation.
Sam already co-authored an article about this, on the OpenAI blog, where he and other key members of OpenAI urged for a universal governance in AI safety.
Moreover, he made his first appearance in front of the US Senate - where he mentioned that government needs to regulate AI as it becomes ‘increasingly powerful’. Altman, thus, has been warning against the much-unrestricted use of AI, while also calling for an international regulatory body for AI
During his tour, Altman will travel to 16 cities: Paris, Warsaw, Lagos, London, Munich, Tel Aviv, Dubai, New Delhi, Singapore, Jakarta, Seoul, Tokyo, and Melbourne.1
As I am writing this, Sam Altman is in India (the country where I live).
I was excited to see how the Indian Tech leaders would interact with Sam. During his Indian tour, Altman (once again) iterated that the surge in AI could lead to job losses. This is already happening, even in parts of the US, where in almost all industries, AI had a more indirect impact.
Image Source: WION
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi - with whom Sam had a conversation during the tour - tweeted saying India welcomes all collaborations that accelerate digital transformation, for the “empowerment of citizens”.
This empowerment, especially in the age of AI, is necessary. The Tech industry in India is a big one, and harnessing AI in a safe way could tremendously impact productivity - if done in the right way.
While on tour, he also suggested that AI would create new roles and career. And it’s true. We saw the new field of prompt engineering coming up, for example, after a huge surge of generative AI chatbots. AI would similarly open other fields and careers - and pave the way for newer opportunities.
It would have an impact, a huge one on the jobs front, and regulation of such AI machines is crucial in the near future.
The risk associated with AI thus should be addressed at the global level. According to 80000hours.org, AI is one of the most pressing problems in the world, with Nuclear Weapons being on the same list.
The difference is: Nuclear weapons have an international regulatory body, AI doesn’t.
India could be a great starting point for collaborative efforts to enforce such regulations. After all, India has a large talent pool, with strong government support for the tech and AI industry. Sam’s interactions in India, hence, could prove to be fruitful for both him and OpenAI to create a mechanism for the regulation and governing of AI.
However, Altman’s visit to India created controversy due to his comments on the country's ability to create something like OpenAI.
During an event in Delhi, Rajan Anandan - a former Vice President of Google in India and venture capitalist - asked Sam Altman if it is ever possible for Indian engineers with funds around $10 million to build a foundation AI model - like the one OpenAI has developed.
Altman's reply was straight and direct: "The way this works is we're going to tell you, it's totally hopeless to compete with us on training foundation models you shouldn't try, and it's your job to like try anyway. And I believe both of those things. I think it is pretty hopeless".
And this marked the beginning of the controversy.
A controversy that was further fueled by the Tech Mahindra [TM] CEO CP Gurnani, who took Altman's statement as a challenge and tweeted, "Dear Sam Altman, from one CEO to another... CHALLENGE ACCEPTED"
and
Altman later did clarified on Twitter that his comments were taken ‘out of context’.
The Minister of State for IT in India, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, on the other hand, spoke about Altman's visit to India, saying that he is an important man in AI - but people should not consider him anything other than that.
“He's certainly not going to be the last word on what India's aspirations for AI are going to be. He certainly doesn't have an understanding of India's capabilities in AI.” - R Chandrasekhar reportedly said.
The controversy remained nothing but a war of words.
Image Source: Bing Image Creator
I know, I know.
Controversies like these are common in Tech Landscape.
After all, India is one of the few countries that has a good startup ecosystem with a big open market for IT companies all over the world.
However, while I watched the mentioned event live on YouTube, I wondered what India really has on their menu - in terms of AI advancements. TM is not a small organisation, especially not in the Tech or AI front.
It is a USD 6.5+ billion organization with 152k+ professionals across 90 countries - helping thousands of global customers, including Fortune 500 companies. TM is the only Indian IT organization to score "A" in both climate change and water stewardship.
This is a huge plus. We seldom see a Tech company that does better in both the Tech realm and climate change. TM creates a trust factor with its customers, which is accordingly the company's biggest strength.
TM has a strong presence in the field of AI. It’s been offering various AI-related services and solutions from way back, which include: AI Maturity Assessment, Enterprise AI Architecture Evaluation, Platform/Technology Selection, and AI Strategy and Roadmap2.
As you see, TM is more aligned towards business and collaborative projects.
One AI product from TM, which seems to be in the spotlight, is the TechM amplifAI - which is an AI solution that eliminates bottlenecks in the implementation of AI by corporates. This AI technology, according to TM, is pervasive in nature.
But at present, what advantages does TM really have? Can it compete with OpenAI?
Thus, as a conclusion to this post, I weight their advantages side by side
Advantages weighed side by side
Advantages of OpenAI over TM:
- OpenAI is primarily a research organization focusing on developing and advancing AI. Unlike TM - whose major focus is to provide services to business corporations - a major chunk of OpenAI’s capital goes to developing AI.
- OpenAI has already developed the most advanced AI model till date: GPT-4. The AI development will continue to improve.
- OpenAI has made its AI models available to developers through APIs, allowing others to leverage the strong GPT models to use for their own products and services.
Advantages of TM over OpenAI:
- TM offers a much more comprehensive range of AI services as mentioned before, which includes AI Maturity Assessment, Enterprise AI Architecture Evaluation, Platform/Technology Selection, and AI Strategy and Roadmap.
- TM have more workforce and more experience, and for a very long it is a major player in the Tech Industry of India
- TM is backed by the government of India for its numerous projects, thus TM is likely to have a role in Governing and Regulating AI development in the country
- TM is business-centric, which has a design thinking-led approach and frameworks that help identify AI opportunities, and fix AI-related problems, in an organization.
What do you think about it? Let me know in the comments.
Source: https://80.lv/articles/openai-ceo-to-go-on-global-tour-to-engage-with-users-developers/
https://www.techmahindra.com/en-in/artificial-intelligence/