We know that ChatGPT has shortcomings around bias and we are working to improve it. Yesterday, we wrote about OpenAI after some users of ChatGPT reported that the organization co-founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman has turned the chatbot into a political tool and is now using it to promote transgenderism. One ChatGPT complained that the damage done to the credibility of AI by ChatGPT engineers who built in political bias is irreparable. Another ChatGP user said AI says to affirm transgender children.
After a story, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman took to social media to address the issues, along with the hatred directed toward the OpenAI engineers. Altman said in a Twitter thread that ChatGPT has some flaws around bias, which is not uncommon for every new technology. Altman said that the company is working on improving the chatbot. He didn't take kindly the attacks on OpenAI engineers, calling them appalling.
Altman said that OpenAI is working to improve default settings to be more neutral and to empower users to behave in accordance with their individual preferences within broad bounds. This is harder than it sounds and will take some time to get right. OpenAI is not the first AI company to face this problem. In 2021, two Google engineers resigned over the firing of a Black AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru, an Eritrean-born computer scientist who works on algorithmic bias and data mining.
In 2020, Timnit Gebru wrote a paper in which she said that Google and other big tech companies are institutionally racist. Her paper focused on similar issues plaguing ChatGPT about AI language models that have bias against women and people belonging to ethnic minorities.
We covered OpenAI about three years ago after Microsoft invested $1 billion in the organization. A part of the multi-year agreement, the two companies will work together to bring supercomputing technologies and OpenAI will run its services exclusively in Microsoft's cloud.
Through the partnership, the two companies will accelerate breakthroughs in AI and power OpenAI's efforts to create artificial general intelligence AGI. The resulting enhancements to the Azure platform will help developers build the next generation of AI applications. Microsoft and OpenAI will jointly build new Azure AI supercomputing technologies.
When asked recently about ChatGPT and if Microsoft viewed ChatGPT technology as experimental or strategic, its President Brad Smith told Reuters that AI has progressed faster than predicted.
OpenAI was founded in late 2015 by Elon Musk and Sam Altman as a for-profit startup focusing on artificial intelligence AI with the aim of promoting and developing friendly AI in such a way as to benefit humanity as a whole. OpenIA hopes to make its research and patents open to the public, because it wants to collaborate with other institutions and researchers. Both founders are motivated by concerns about existential risk from artificial general intelligence.
We think Altman handled the criticism about the ChatGPT bias very well. The fact that he admitted to the ChatGPT algorithm bias is a step in the right direction.