ChatGPT-maker Sam Altman says era of remote work is over

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, has said that employees working from office can create new products while remote work model creates confusion. At a session organized by fintech company, Stripe, he further added that we still don’t have the technology that is needed for people to go fully remote, as reported by India Today Tech.

Talking about work from home, Altman added that he considers remote work as an experiment. He stated, “I think definitely one of tech industry’s worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody (thought they) could go full remote forever, and startups didn’t need to be together. There was going to be no loss of creativity. I would say that the experiment on that is over, and the technology is not yet good enough that people can be full remote forever, particularly on startups.”

Prior to this, Altman has expressed his inclination towards working from office. As per his tweet, “tech companies who rushed to full remote permanently made a big mistake, and the cracks are starting to show.” He further added that OpenAI’s some of the best talents are working remotely. He said, “some of our best people are remote, and we will continue to support it always, so please don’t let hating SF stop you from applying to OpenAI! I don’t like the open air fentanyl markets either.”

Discussing about the importance of working from office for a startup, Altman noted, “The more unclear and early the product is, the more in-person time the team needs to grind together,” he added.

Altman also spoke about the future of AI. According to Altman, AI needs to be treated with “extreme seriousness” as the tech might have “existential risk” attached to it.

‘Godfather of AI’ , Geoffrey Hinton resigned from Google this week and blew the whistle on AI, the technology he helped developing. He further explained that the reason he decided to leave Google was so that he could talk freely about potential dangers of AI, without having Google attached to it.

It was recently reported by Reuters that The White House will host CEOs of top artificial intelligence companies, including Alphabet Inc’s Google and Microsoft to discuss risks and safeguards of AI.