OpenAI's Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap has warned against expecting too much, too soon, from AI's ability to transform businesses.
In an interview with CNBC this week, Lightcap was asked about what he viewed as the most "overhyped" aspect of AI today. He replied that many businesses excitedly expect AI can help them cut costs, address significant structural issues or reverse negative growth trends.
"I think the overhyped aspect is that it, in one fell swoop, can deliver substantive business change," Lightcap said.
We talk to a lot of companies that come in, and they want to kind of hang on us the thing that they’ve wanted to do for a long time, 'We want to get revenue growth back to 15 percent year over year,' or 'We want to cut X million dollars of cost out of this cost line.' And there’s almost never a silver bullet answer there – there’s never one thing you can do with AI that solves that problem in full."
Lightcap clarified that AI is still in its "infancy" and in a relatively experimental stage of development, so no concrete expectations of its impact as part of business tools or applications should be set.
ChatGPT Enterprise
Lightcap's comments are unlikely to slow down the momentum train around AI's potentially transformative impact on businesses in the long term.
However, it's fair for the COO to advise caution given how fallible AI is. Generative AI is still being noted for producing hallucination answers to prompts, both inaccurate and outright lies, while much of the content produced can lack substance or character. More critically, for business processes, there are still significant concerns about accidental data breaches of sensitive business information after users unthinkingly input the data into ChatGPT and other conversational AI prompts.
Still, while enterprise shouldn't get too far ahead of themselves too soon, OpenAI is conscious of AI's potentially revolutionary impact on businesses.
OpenAI has targeted enterprise specifically this year — as has Microsoft and Amazon — with the launch of ChatGPT Enterprise in August. ChatGPT Enterprise provided a comprehensive swathe of new features to appeal to business needs, such as enterprise-grade security and privacy, unlimited higher-speed GPT-4 access, customisation options, longer context windows for processing more extended inputs, and next-gen data analysis functionalities.
OpenAI said it had received “unprecedented demand” for a version of ChatGPT that catered specifically for businesses, claiming that over 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies had teams that used the service in their workflows.
