If you feel that it’s hard to keep pace with the frenetic developments in AI, you aren’t alone.
OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor says that even he finds it hard to keep up with the rapid changes that seem to occur almost daily in the field of Artificial Intelligence. “I am the chairman of OpenAI. I run a fairly successful applied AI company and I have trouble keeping up with everything going on,” he said in an interview.
“I’m probably most well situated in the world almost to do so. So it just feels insane to me right now. I think it’s exciting though — I think it’s a privilege to be like sitting here with all of you, and I hope you’re enjoying being in this moment because, you know, I think our society will be very different 10 years from now, and all of you’re in the middle of it. And that’s pretty exciting. And I don’t think there’s many other times in history where you get to know you’re in the middle of something that’s significant. So I pinch myself every day,” he added.
Taylor is the Chairman of the Board at OpenAI. He has front-row access to what’s going on at OpenAI, which is unarguably the flagship company of the AI revolution. But in spite of his insider access — or perhaps because of it — he’s exposed to the cutting edge of what’s not only happening at OpenAI, but also at rival companies. And there are rivals springing up at rapid pace — OpenAI is being challenged in the models space by Google and Grok, which have now released models more capable than its own, and also in the open-source space, where its open-source model seems to be delayed because of stiff competition posed by Chinese labs like DeepSeek and Kimi.
Apart from technical breakthroughs, there are breakthroughs in the product space too. While ChatGPT has become the fifth more visited website in the world, a plethora of AI tools keep coming up almost daily, which use AI to solve novel use-cases. OpenAI likely keeps an eye on these tools as well — it had tried to acquire Windsurf — and looks to shape its own offerings accordingly. As such, these are busy times for anyone in AI, and a perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime moment for those in the industry — rarely has so much world-changing progress happened so quickly.