Developers of artificial intelligence applications likely let out a collective sigh of relief Tuesday when comments from OpenAI Inc. co-founder and CEO Sam Altman were leaked from a private meeting where he said the company would not make products that compete with its clients' businesses.
First reported by Fortune, Altman in May was speaking with 20 start-up founders and developers in London when one attendee, Raza Habib, the cofounder and CEO of the Y Combinator-backed Humanloop, posted about the event on his personal blog. Humanloop is a London-based AI company that helps businesses build apps on top of large language models.
According to Habib's blog — now since taken down, but a copy still lives on Internet Archive Wayback Machine — Altman stated that the San Francisco-based company would not be competing with its customers.
"Quite a few developers said they were nervous about building with the OpenAI APIs when OpenAI might end up releasing products that are competitive to them," Habib wrote. "Sam said that OpenAI would not release more products beyond ChatGPT."
Habib described Altman as being "quite open" in his discussion, where he also spoke of OpenAI's mission, AI's impact on society and the roadblocks that company is currently facing. High on the list of problems the company faces is access to graphic processing units (GPUs).
"OpenAI is extremely GPU-limited and this is delaying a lot of their short-term plans," Habib wrote. "The biggest customer complaint was about the reliability and speed of the (ChatGPT) API. Sam acknowledged their concern and explained that most of the issue was a result of GPU shortages."
Altman has been traveling around the world to promote generative AI — a type of artificial intelligence that can communicate with users to create text, images, sounds and more — but to also raise awareness to the possible dangers and need for regulation and guidelines. In May, Altman was a signatory on a letter warning of the risks posed by letting AI development go without guardrails.
Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind, Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, and Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates were also part of the group of industry leaders to sign the simple, one sentence letter which read: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."
The Silicon Valley Business Journal reached out to OpenAI for comment and await a response.
