Last year, OpenAI made a splash with its press event in San Francisco, announcing several new products and tools, including the ill-fated App Store-like GPT Store. However, this year’s DevDay conference will be a more subdued affair.
No Next-Gen Flagship Model at DevDay
On Monday, OpenAI confirmed that it won’t release its next major flagship model during DevDay. Instead, the company will focus on updates to its APIs and developer services.
"We’re not planning to announce our next model at DevDay," an OpenAI spokesperson told TechCrunch. "We’ll be focused more on educating developers about what’s available and showcasing dev community stories."
DevDay 2024: A Series of On-the-Road Developer Engagement Sessions
OpenAI’s DevDay events will take place in San Francisco on October 1, London on October 30, and Singapore on November 21. These sessions will feature workshops, breakout sessions, demos with the OpenAI product and engineering staff, and developer spotlights.
Registration Details:
- Registration costs $450 (or $0 through scholarships available for eligible attendees)
- Applications to close on August 15
OpenAI’s recent focus has been on incremental steps rather than monumental leaps in generative AI. The company is refining its approaches to improving the overall performance of its models and preventing them from going off the rails as often as they previously did.
The Challenge of Finding High-Quality Training Data
One of the reasons OpenAI appears to have lost its technical lead in the generative AI race is the increasing challenge of finding high-quality training data. Its models, like most generative AI models, are trained on massive collections of web data.
Data Access Blocking: A Growing Concern
Many creators are choosing to gate their data over fears that it will be plagiarized or that they won’t receive credit or pay. According to data from Originality.AI, more than 35% of the world’s top 1,000 websites now block OpenAI’s web crawler.
A study by MIT’s Data Provenance Initiative found that around 25% of data from "high-quality" sources has been restricted from the major datasets used to train AI models. This trend could have significant implications for developers, with Epoch AI predicting that they will run out of data to train generative AI models between 2026 and 2032.
Costly Licensing Agreements
OpenAI is said to have developed a reasoning technique that could improve its models’ responses on certain questions, particularly math questions. However, the company’s CTO Mira Murati has promised a future model with "Ph.D.-level" intelligence.
This pledge comes at a significant cost, as OpenAI continues to hemorrhage billions of dollars training its models and hiring top-paid research staff. The company still faces many controversies, including using copyrighted data for training, restrictive employee NDAs, and effectively pushing out safety researchers.
A Slower Product Cycle: A Silver Lining?
The slower product cycle might have the beneficial side effect of countering the narrative that OpenAI is prioritizing growth over safety. However, only time will tell if this shift in focus will ultimately benefit the company and its users.