Sam Altman’s decision to declare a “code red” at OpenAI earlier this month may have caught the industry’s attention, but it wasn’t a first for the artificial intelligence company.
The San Francisco-based startup’s leadership has made the same declaration previously, explicitly instructing employees to drop lower-priority tasks and concentrate on a single goal, said OpenAI Chief Research Officer Mark Chen. “We do this when we want to have this focusing effort on one particular topic,” Chen said in an interview.
The latest code red came two weeks after Alphabet Inc.’s Google released a widely praised new AI model that outperformed OpenAI’s best software on a number of benchmarks. OpenAI’s Altman called for staffers to redirect internal resources to speed up improvements to ChatGPT and delay progress on other efforts such as autonomous AI agents and advertising.
“What it means for me is on chat, on reasoning, on the core ChatGPT product, it is this focusing effort to make sure that we get the fundamentals right,” Chen said. That includes ensuring the chatbot works quickly and reliably.
Since issuing the code red, OpenAI has rolled out several updates to bolster its flagship chatbot, including releasing a more advanced AI model designed to make ChatGPT better at coding, science and a wide range of work tasks. The company also unveiled a new image-generating AI model to make visuals faster and better.
Heading into next year, Chen said his team is squarely focused on figuring out the algorithms, infrastructure and research that are needed for OpenAI to train increasingly capable AI models. The company has committed to spend $1.4 trillion on infrastructure over the next eight years to support this effort.
“Everything else really just feels like a little bit of annoyance or distraction,” he said.
Reporting by Rachel Metz
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