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OpenAI's chief technology officer has said that the company was unprepared for how popular ChatGPT would be when it launched last year.
In an interview with Fortune, Mira Murati said that OpenAI was caught off-guard by the frenzied reception to its generative AI chatbot.
"We thought it would be significant, and we prepared for it," she said. "And then of course, all of the preparations became completely irrelevant a few hours later."
"We had to really adapt and change the way that we operate. But I think that's actually the key to everything that we're doing because the pace of advancement in technology is just incredibly rapid."
ChatGPT became an overnight sensation when it was made available to the public in November 2022, reaching 100 million users just 2 months after launch.
The chatbot, which is able to quickly generate text and converse with users on almost any topic, sparked a global AI arms race as other tech giants scrambled to roll out challengers to OpenAI's GPT model.
Google declared a "code red" in response to ChatGPT's explosion in popularity and launched its own chatbot, Bard, just months later.
The arrival of ChatGPT has also sparked a fierce debate over the risks of generative AI models, which have a tendency to "hallucinate" wildly false information. Murati warned that the intense competition between AI companies racing to be the first to roll out products risked producing "a race to the bottom on safety."
"I think competition is good because it can push advancement and progress," she told Fortune.
"I don't think competition is bad, per se. It's more that if everyone is mainly motivated by just that, and losing sight of the risks and what's at stake, that would be a huge problem."
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider, made outside normal working hours.
