OpenAI's Srinivas Narayanan Says ChatGPT Is No Longer Just Conversational: It's Now Taking Actions 'On Your Behalf'

AI is not just a Q/A tool, says Srinivas Narayanan, Vice President of Engineering at OpenAI, but an agent who takes action on your behalf. In an interview, Narayanan shares his beliefs about the dynamic future of autonomous AI on a global scale.

What Happened: Narayanan underlined that OpenAI is entering a new era where it evolves from a simple chatbot. "The first ChatGPT was conversational. You ask a question, you get an answer. We’re now in a phase where it’s starting to take actions on your behalf," he said in an interview with MoneyControl.  

Narayanan also highlighted how quickly the technology has progressed in a short span of time. "Previously, it was doing seconds of work. Today, it’s doing minutes of work. Two years from now, it should do hours or days of work," he observed.

At the same time, Narayanan cautioned against the idea that AI is anywhere near complete. "I don’t want us to create a perception that somehow we have solved all the problems… There is still a lot of unforeseen research and product problems," he said.

Sophisticated design thinking is required to build trust with AI agents, he said. "What does it mean for a personal assistant that understands you deeply? What do you trust it with? How does it talk to other personal assistants? We don’t know how to solve all these, but we want to solve it one at a time, iteratively," Narayanan explained.

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Why It Matters: Narayanan's bold predictions of AI come just as Jony Ive, the famed designer behind many of Apple's most popular products, joins OpenAI in a $6.5 billion deal with his startup io.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Ive reportedly described their vision for compact, intelligent AI “companions” designed to fit smoothly into users' lives to staffers last month, with Altman claiming that the new deal could add up to $1 trillion in value to OpenAI.

Altman also shared that his and Ive's vision is based on the realization that the hardware available currently is simply not built for the kind of AI experiences they envision.

As these statements, alongside Narayanan's, point to a more AI-integrated future, experts like former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt are warning that AI will make it harder for people to distinguish between online and offline worlds.

Ive himself recently highlighted the "uneasy relationship" human beings have with technology at the moment, claiming that his collaborative project with Altman is driven by the belief that "humanity deserves better." Earlier, Altman himself had called for approaching large-scale changes brought on by AI with "humility" and "caution."

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