Former OpenAI executive Mira Murati says it could take decades, but TO THE Systems will eventually perform a wide range of cognitive tasks as well as humans do — a potential technological milestone widely known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
“Right now, it seems pretty achievable,” Murati said at WIRED’s The Big Interview event in San Francisco on Tuesday. In his first interview since then resign as chief technology officer of OpenAI in September, Murati told WIRED’s Steven Levy that she wasn’t overly concerned about recent chatter in the AI industry that developing more powerful generative AI models is proving challenging.
“Current evidence shows that progress is likely to continue,” Murati said. “There’s not much evidence to the contrary. It’s unclear whether we’ll need new ideas to get to AGI-level systems. I’m quite optimistic that progress will continue.”
The remarks reflect his continued interest in trying to find a way to bring increasingly capable AI systems into the world despite the split from OpenAI. Reuters reported it in October that Murati is founding his own AI startup to develop proprietary models and that he could raise more than $100 million in venture capital funding. Murati declined to elaborate on the feat on Tuesday.
“I’m trying to figure out what it’s going to be like,” he said. “I’m in the middle of it all.”
Murati started in aerospace and then at Elon Musk’s Tesla, where he worked on the Model S and Model X electric cars. He also oversaw product and engineering at virtual reality startup Leap Motion before joining OpenAI in 2018 and help manage services such as ChatGPT AND Dall-E. She he became one of OpenAI’s top executives AND he was briefly in office last year while the members of the board struggled with the fate of CEO Sam Altman.
When Murati resigned, Altman credited her with providing support during difficult times and described her as instrumental to OpenAI’s growth.
Murati did not publicly specify why he left OpenAI other than to say it was the right time to pursue personal exploration. Dozens of OpenAI’s first employees they are gone the non-profit in recent years, some out of their frustration with Altman’s increasing focus on revenue generation over the pursuit of purely academic research. Murati told WIRED’s Levy that there has been “too much obsession” with departures and not enough with the substance of AI development.
He pointed to work on producing synthetic data to train models and growing investment in computing infrastructure to power them as important areas to follow. Breakthroughs in these areas will one day enable AGI, he said. But it’s not all technological. “This technology is not inherently good or bad,” he said. “It comes with both sides.” It is up to society, Murati said, to collectively continue to steer patterns toward the good, so we are well prepared for the day when AGI arrives.
