OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reveals company hasn’t trained GPT with paying customer data ‘for a while’

Altman stated that OpenAI’s clients had expressed their disapproval of the use of their data for training AI models, prompting the company to revise its plans. According to reports, OpenAI quietly updated its terms of service on March 1st to reflect this change in policy. The use of AI technology has sparked debates on ethics, privacy, and the potential risks of its proliferation.

According to a recent statement by Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, the company has not been using any data from its API clients for training purposes for quite some time. API, or application programming interfaces, are software frameworks that enable direct access to OpenAI’s technology. Notably, OpenAI’s clientele currently includes major companies such as Microsoft, Salesforce, and Snapchat.

In a recent event hosted by fintech company Stripe, Sam Altman expressed his opinion on remote work, stating that the era of working remotely was now over. Altman argued that having employees working from an office setting is more conducive to creating new products, whereas remote work can lead to confusion. Altman, who is 38 years old, viewed remote work as an experiment and believed that the tech industry’s assumption that everyone could work remotely indefinitely was one of its biggest mistakes.

At the same event hosted by Stripe, Sam Altman expressed his belief that assuming everyone could work remotely indefinitely was one of the biggest mistakes made by the tech industry in recent times. Altman stated that the notion that startups did not need to be physically together and that there would be no loss of creativity was misguided. He further emphasized that the experiment on remote work was over and that technology had not yet advanced to the point where people could work remotely indefinitely, especially in the context of startups. According to Altman, the need for physical proximity and in-person collaboration is crucial to fostering creativity and innovation in the workplace.

Sam Altman’s comments coincided with reports stating that OpenAI’s losses had reportedly doubled to approximately $540 million in 2022. According to sources familiar with the company’s financials, as cited by The Information, the increase in losses was due to the development of ChatGPT and the recruitment of several executives from Google. The report also underscored the significant costs associated with training large language models, which were incurred well before ChatGPT was publicly available.

OpenAI has recently released a paid version of its chatbot, but the costs associated with training future versions of its software are expected to rise due to the growing number of customers using its AI technology. Meanwhile, it has been reported that Sam Altman privately discussed the possibility of raising approximately $100 billion in the next few years to develop artificial general intelligence. Such an ambitious endeavor would require a massive infusion of funds, which would potentially make OpenAI one of the most well-funded AI research companies in the world.