Sam Altman says OpenAI won’t train on customer data; heralds the end of remote work era

In the wake of all the chaos surrounding AI, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that his company has not trained its large language models such as GPT with paying customer data ‘for a while’. Altman was speaking to CNBC when he made the revelation. He added that customers clearly did not want OpenAI to train on their data and because of this the company has changed its plans. Reportedly, OpenAI’s terms of services were quietly updated on March 1.

“We don’t train on any API data at all, we haven’t for a while,” Altman was quoted as saying by the media outlet. Application programming interfaces (API) are frameworks that allow users to directly access OpenAI’s software. As of now OpenAI’s portfolio of customers include Microsoft, Salesforce, and Snapchat.

Altman on remote work

Meanwhile, during another interaction at an event hosted by fintech firm, Stripe, Altman said that the era of remote work was over. According to Altman, staff working from the office can create new products, while those operating remotely only adds to confusion. The 38-year-old said that he considered remote work as an experiment and that it was one of the worst mistakes of the tech industry to assume that everybody could go fully remote forever.

“I think definitely one of the 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,” he said. “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 fully remote forever, particularly on startups,” he was quoted as saying at the event.

OpenAI’s losses after developing ChatGPT

His comments come at a time when OpenAI reportedly doubled its losses to around $540 million in 2022. This according to The Information was because it developed ChatGPT and hired some executives from Google. The news portal cited the information as shared by three people with the knowledge of the company’s financials. The report highlighted the steep costs of training large language models much before ChatGPT was made available to the public.

Recently, OpenAI launched a paid version of the chatbot. However, the costs are likely to be on the rise as the company would be training future versions of its software considering the increasing number of customers using its AI technology. Meanwhile, it was also reported that Altman had privately suggested that his company may attempt to raise around $100 billion in the coming years to develop artificial general intelligence.