OpenAI’s Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap has warned against expecting too much, too soon, from AI’s ability to transform businesses.
In an interview with CNBC this week, Lightcap was asked about what he viewed as the most “overhyped” aspect of AI today. He replied that many businesses excitedly expect AI can help them cut costs, address significant structural issues or reverse negative growth trends.
“I think the overhyped aspect is that it, in one fell swoop, can deliver substantive business change,” Lightcap said.
We talk to a lot of companies that come in, and they want to kind of hang on us the thing that they’ve wanted to do for a long time, ‘We want to get revenue growth back to 15 percent year over year,’ or ‘We want to cut X million dollars of cost out of this cost line.’ And there’s almost never a silver bullet answer there – there’s never one thing you can do with AI that solves that problem in full.”
Lightcap clarified that AI is still in its “infancy” and in a relatively experimental stage of development, so no concrete expectations of its impact as part of business tools or applications should be set.
ChatGPT Enterprise
Lightcap’s comments are unlikely to slow down the momentum train around AI’s potentially transformative impact on businesses in the long term.
However, it’s fair for the COO to advise caution given how fallible AI is. Generative AI is still being noted for producing hallucination answers to prompts, both inaccurate and outright lies, while much of the content produced can lack substance or character. More critically, for business processes, there are still significant concerns about accidental data breaches of sensitive business information after users unthinkingly input the data into ChatGPT and other conversational AI prompts.
Still, while enterprise shouldn’t get too far ahead of themselves too soon, OpenAI is conscious of AI’s potentially revolutionary impact on businesses.
OpenAI has targeted enterprise specifically this year — as has Microsoft and Amazon — with the launch of ChatGPT Enterprise in August. ChatGPT Enterprise provided a comprehensive swathe of new features to appeal to business needs, such as enterprise-grade security and privacy, unlimited higher-speed GPT-4 access, customisation options, longer context windows for processing more extended inputs, and next-gen data analysis functionalities.
OpenAI said it had received “unprecedented demand” for a version of ChatGPT that catered specifically for businesses, claiming that over 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies had teams that used the service in their workflows.
In his CNBC interview, Lightcap added that OpenAI was still progressing through an extensive waitlist for ChatGPT Enterprise.
Lightcap notably avoided questions about last month’s OpenAI saga.
What Happened With OpenAI Last Month?
To recap as concisely as possible, Sam Altman was ousted as OpenAI CEO by its board on Friday, November 17. Cofounder Greg Brockman was removed from his board position, but the other board members intended for him to stay on as President, but he resigned in solidarity with Altman.
Following an indignant response from OpenAI investors and employees, Altman and the board discussed a potential return over the following weekend before discussions broke down. Microsoft then released a statement saying it had hired Altman and Brockman to manage an advanced AI research team overnight on Sunday, but this turned out to be premature.
Last Monday, a letter signed by over 700 of OpenAI’s 770 employees demanded the board’s resignations and Altman’s return; otherwise, they would leave themselves to follow Altman to Microsoft. On Tuesday night Pacific Time, November 21, Altman was reinstated, the previous board was removed, and a new interim one was put into its place to oversee the hiring of the next permanent group. Brockman also returned.
“I love OpenAI, and everything I’ve done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together,” Altman said. “When I decided to join Microsoft on Sunday evening, it was clear that was the best path for me and the team. With the new board and with Satya’s support, I’m looking forward to returning to OpenAI and building on our strong partnership with Microsoft.”
The new interim OpenAI board comprises Bret Taylor, Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo. D’Angelo is a representative of the previous board. The interim board is set up to decide on a new nine-person board intended to produce better governance for the business. There were rumours that Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest investor, would take a seat on the new board, but that is now looking unlikely. That won’t stop the tech giant closely monitoring OpenAI’s new governance processes closely, however.
“We are encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on X. “We believe this is the first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance. Sam, Greg, and I have talked and agreed they have a key role to play along with the OAI leadership team in ensuring OAI continues to thrive and build on its mission.”
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