According To The CEO Of OpenAI, Linguistic And Cultural Diversity In Chatbots Is Crucial To The Company’s Objective

Language and cultural diversity, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, are “very important” to his company’s purpose as it develops and trains potent AI systems.

Regarding language inclusivity in AI, Altman told California Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla, “We think this is really important.”

“One example is that we worked with the government of Iceland, which has fewer speakers than many of the languages that are well represented on the internet, to ensure that their language was included in our model,” stated Altman.

Tuesday’s hearing of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law featured testimony from Altman, Christina Montgomery, Chief Privacy and Trust Officer at IBM, and Gary Marcus, Emeritus Professor of Law at New York University, on the topic of how to regulate sophisticated artificial intelligence systems.

Asserting that social media companies in recent years have not “adequately invested in content moderation, tools, and resources for their non-English” users,” Padilla questioned Altman and Montgomery on how OpenAI and IBM are “ensuring language and cultural inclusion” in their products.

With regard to its users, Altman asserted that OpenAI’s technology “will have lots of positive impact,” “but, in particular, underrepresented people who have not had as much access to technology around the world.”

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is trained on a tonne of text, including news stories and books, and utilises that training to respond to questions from users who enter them on the platform. ChatGPT was published late last year and set off a race in the tech world to develop equivalent and more powerful systems. The company’s most sophisticated system, GPT-4, is “pretty good at a large number of languages” after being better taught than earlier systems, according to Altman.

He continued by saying that promoting cultural diversity on the platform is something OpenAI is “equally focused” on.

OpenAI is “excited to work with people who have particular datasets and to work to collect a representative set of values from around the world to draw these wide bounds of what the system can do,” the executive stated.