Alex Konrad

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has been spending plenty of time at Microsoft recently; he posed for this photo on their Redmond, Wash. campus in 2019.IAN C. BATES/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX In a rare interview, OpenAI’s CEO talks about AI model ChatGPT, artificial general intelligence and Google Search. As CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman captains the buzziest — and most scrutinized — startup in the fast-growing generative AI category, the subject of a recent feature story in the February issue of Forbes....

Today’s AI-based image generators aren’t self-aware. But Forbes asked Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion and OpenAI’s DALL-E—to attempt to visualize themselves, using an identical prompt: “an artistic portrait of the artificial intelligence called X, created by the artificial intelligence X.” These were the authors’ favorites of the resulting self-portrait attempts. DreamStudio/DALL-E Artificial intelligence will be 2023’s hottest topic, and one subject to debate. That’s what Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates told Forbes in an exclusive conversation about the suddenly exploding field....

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google. Corbis via Getty Images As the battle in artificial intelligence technology heats up between Silicon Valley companies, Google cofounder Sergey Brin is getting hands-on again with software code, after years of day-to-day absence. On Jan. 24, Brin appeared to file his first request in years for access to code, according to screenshots viewed by Forbes. Two sources said the request was related to LaMDA, Google’s natural language chatbot—a project initially announced in 2021, but which has recently garnered increased attention as Google tries to fend off rival OpenAI, which released the popular ChatGPT bot in November....

FUTURE SHOCK | ChatGPT’s popularity was unexpected inside the company. “None of us were that enamored by it,” says OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman. “None of us were like, ‘This is really useful.’ ” Ethan Pines for Forbes In an unremarkable conference room inside OpenAI’s office, insulated from the mid-January rain pelting San Francisco, company president Greg Brockman surveys the “energy levels” of the team overseeing the company’s new artificial intelligence model, ChatGPT....

Illustration by Gracelynn Wan for Forbes In 2016, a few months after becoming CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai made a sweeping proclamation: Google, whose name had become synonymous with search, would now be an “AI-first” company. Announced at Google’s massive I/O developer conference, it was his first major order of business after taking the company reins. What AI-first meant, exactly, was murky, but the stakes were not. Two years earlier, Amazon had blindsided Google by releasing its voice assistant Alexa....

Illustration by Gracelynn Wan for Forbes; Photo by Coneyl Jay/Getty Images Now valued at $300 million while still pre-revenue, per a source, Tome says it’s the fastest productivity software maker to ever reach 1 million users since its September release. IN a chat box below a black and otherwise blank canvas, Tome cofounder Henri Liriani types a request for a fundraising pitch for a telescope startup. In less than a minute, Tome’s software unfurls the presentation he requested: eight slides organized by a table of contents, complete with intro text, business model and sales plan—even cyberpunk-themed images, all generated by AI....