The silent female general behind ChatGPT

“Sorry, I don’t know about Mira Murati, the CTO of OpenAI,” ChatGPT replied. In a similar sentence in English, the super AI said it only knew Sam Altman as the company’s co-founder and CEO, because the data it used to train it was from before 2021.

In a February 5 interview with OpenAI senior staff, Sam Altman called Mira Murati the “creator” of ChatGPT. She also led the development of the Dall-E and GPT-3 painting AIs.

From Mechanical Engineer to Tesla, OpenAI Director

While you can’t ask about Murati via ChatGPT, you can find information about her tech journey on rival Google Search. Murati, born in 1988 in San Francisco, skipped grades as a child. She studied mechanical engineering at Dartmouth College and was retained as a teaching assistant before joining the renowned research firm Goldman Sachs. In 2012, she joined the aerospace company Zodiac Aerospace.

A year later, Murati joined Tesla as a senior product manager and became one of the people responsible for the design and development of several models, such as the Model X. She also participated in several projects at the aerospace company SpaceX before joining the startup Leap Motion in 2016. This is a company that specializes in developing products that replace mice and keyboards with motion sensors mounted on human hands.

From June 2018 to December 2020, Mira Murati served as Vice President of AI Applications and Partnerships at OpenAI. She then became responsible for the company’s overall product development and served as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) since May 2022.

Under Murati’s technical leadership, ChatGPT became one of the fastest products to reach 100 million users of all time. In the first month of the year, ChatGPT surpassed Bitcoin in the list of most searched keywords, according to Google Trends statistics.

Contrary to the image of a female tech general, Murati has quite dreamy hobbies. She loves poetry. Her favorite book is Duino Elegies, a collection of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. And her favorite movie is 2001: A Space Odyssey because it can "stir up the imagination" with images and music, such as the scene where the space shuttle docks to Johann Strauss's Blue Danube Waltz.

Challenges in developing ChatGPT

When the world went crazy over ChatGPT, most of the attention was focused on Sam Altman. However, the OpenAI CEO said that Murati was the one who created ChatGPT.

In a rare public appearance with Time, the female CTO admitted that she did not expect the support of users for this AI to be so great. "I also did not believe that this chatbot could be successful. When I decided to introduce the project to the public, I even predicted that it would fail," she said. She expected ChatGPT to truly create breakthroughs in each industry, not just a curious technology.

ChatGPT is essentially a big conversational model, Murati says, a massive neural network trained to “guess and match words” to continue a conversation with a user as coherently as possible.

“It can make up facts, the AI’s answers aren’t always right,” she admits of ChatGPT’s weakness. To overcome this problem, the company built a conversational model, allowing the AI ​​to converse with users to “teach” it the correct answer if it gives wrong information.

Users can respond with the syntax: "Are you sure? The correct answer is...". From there, ChatGPT opens a new conversation with updated knowledge. However, this opens up another risk for AI: users can intentionally feed ChatGPT wrong information.

AI concerns

Having witnessed the explosion of ChatGPT and identified the platform's biggest weakness, Murati said she was concerned about AI being abused or becoming a tool for bad actors. "How can we regulate how users apply technology? How can we know if the use of AI is in line with human values?", the 8x CTO asked.

She believes the answer lies in public awareness of the responsible and controlled use of AI. “There is definitely a need for regulatory agencies and governments to monitor the technology. It is not too early for policymakers to set standards and consider the impact that AI can have on the community,” Murati said.

While the community is currently debating whether ChatGPT will replace humans in many fields, the OpenAI CTO believes that, like previous revolutions, new jobs will be created and old jobs will be lost. She believes that education will be the field that can change the most with the advancement of AI.

“With tools like ChatGPT, you can have an endless conversation with AI to understand a concept that fits your abilities. That’s the huge potential of technology in opening up a personalized education model,” she said.

According to VnExpress