Good morning, Broadsheet readers! The Bay Area is set to get a WNBA franchise, software company Carta is facing two lawsuits from former female employees, and Fortune’s Michal Lev-Ram explains how OpenAI CTO Mira Murati is shaping your future. Have a restful weekend!
- Designing the future. Mira Murati is not a household name. But the product she oversees—ChatGPT—is fast becoming one.
Murati, 34, is the chief technology officer of OpenAI, the San Francisco-based company that launched the popular chatbot nearly a year ago, ushering in a generative AI revolution and garnering the startup a reported valuation of $30 billion (if current rumors prove to be true, that figure could soon triple). Murati is also on the cover of our latest issue with a story written by Fortune reporter Kylie Robison and me, and Murati is a newcomer to the Most Powerful Women list, which published yesterday.
Generative AI is already having immense impact on pretty much every sector imaginable. But it’s what comes next that will have even more impact. What sort of regulations and legal precedents will be put in place as the technology becomes more and more ubiquitous? What kinds of jobs will be created, augmented, or outright erased in the process? That’s why much of our cover story about Murati focuses on the future—and her role in shaping it.
Murati is optimistic when it comes to what’s on the horizon, as you’d expect. But she’s also clear-eyed, saying that AI could end up posing an existential threat to humanity (there's just a “small” chance that it will wipe out civilization, according to the CTO). Interestingly, she devotes a significant amount of time thinking through the worst-case scenarios at OpenAI, asking herself and her team questions like “how bad are the bad things” that can be done with each product iteration. Indeed, OpenAI has erred on the side of being more restrictive with what users can do with ChatGPT (and DALL-E, a tool that turns text prompts into images). But there’s been plenty of room for errors and hallucinations, instances when chatbots like ChatGPT have concocted inaccurate—and sometimes worrying—answers to questions.
The fact that Murati’s role at OpenAI puts her at the forefront of this cutting-edge future is a bit ironic. The former Tesla engineer was born in Albania under a totalitarian communist regime, and credits boredom with helping to spark a curiosity for knowledge (even the slow internet speeds in her native country couldn’t stop her from tinkering with computers). Her trajectory at OpenAI, and of course the company’s own growth, has been lightning fast. But figuring out how to keep rapid innovation and iteration going—all while thinking through and planning for worst case scenarios—will likely only become more complex as the competition with other companies (and countries) increases.
Murati herself is concerned about the current arms race in AI: “I think the downside is a race to the bottom on safety,” she says in our cover story. “That is the downside for sure.”
Read the full cover story here.
Michal Lev-Ram
michal.levram@fortune.com
@mlevram
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