ChatGPT-maker OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that employees working from the office can create new products while the remote work model creates confusion. According to India Today Tech, he added that we still need the required technology for people to work entirely remotely during a session hosted by the fintech company Stripe.
Altman added that he considers remote work as an experiment when discussing work from home. He stated, “I think definitely one of tech industry’s worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody (thought they) could go full remote forever, and startups didn’t need to be together. There was going to be no loss of creativity. I would say that the experiment on that is over, and the technology is not yet good enough that people can be full remote forever, particularly on startups.”
Before this, Altman expressed his inclination towards working from the office. As per his tweet, “tech companies who rushed to full remote permanently made a big mistake, and the cracks are starting to show.”
He added that OpenAI’s best talents are working remotely. He said, “some of our best people are remote, and we will continue to support it always, so please don’t let hating SF stop you from applying to OpenAI! I don’t like the open air fentanyl markets either.”
Discussing the importance of working from the office for a startup, Altman noted, “The more unclear and early the product is, the more in-person time the team needs to grind together,” he added.
Altman also discussed the future of AI. Considering that AI may pose an “existential risk,” Altman says the technology needs to be taken extremely seriously.
‘Godfather of AI’, Geoffrey Hinton, resigned from Google this week and blew the whistle on AI, the technology he helped develop. He continued by saying that he left Google to be able to speak freely about the potential dangers posed by AI without having Google associated with it.
According to Reuters, the White House will host CEOs of leading artificial intelligence firms, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft, to discuss the risks and safeguards associated with AI.
