The plinky-plunky music in the lead-up to the OpenAI livestream announcing GPT-4o and a desktop app was both anxiety-inducing and placating, complete with the sounds of raindrops and a ticking clock. It’s an apt representation of the dichotomy between what OpenAI does and how it presents itself to the world.
And, from the choice of presenters to the friendly vibe — including the soothing female GPT-4o voice, which sounds like a kind kindergarten teacher — the message of the OpenAI event was, “We’re your friends; we’re not like other tech companies; let us help you.” All of it seems like a very intentional choice to position the company as the AI maker you can trust, despite (or perhaps in light of) ongoing concerns about copyright infringement, job replacement, and misinformation risks.
From the ground up, the event was designed to be nonthreatening and intimate. For starters, it was led by CTO Mira Murati instead of CEO Sam Altman. Murati, the brilliant and beautiful chief technology officer, has been largely spared from controversy. She navigated the Sam Altman coup by stepping up as CEO when briefly appointed, but maintained support for Altman, representing a steady voice amidst the chaos.
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OpenAI has been saying one thing and doing another for some time. Its mission “is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” but the company has been accused of training its AI models on content scraped from the web without credit or compensation. It announced its AI video generator, Sora, as a tool for making creative visions come to life, but it still hasn’t revealed what the model was trained on, although many suspect it was data scraped from YouTube and other videos on the web.
The company continues to release technology without transparency around how it was created, but throughout all of it, Altman and OpenAI insist they are for regulation and safe deployment of generative AI.
The message is that the public should blindly trust what OpenAI is doing. And today’s event, with its warm wood tones and lightness and laughter, crystallized this approach. Whether we believe it or not is a different story.