OpenAI will host a developer conference — its first ever — on November 6, the company announced today.
At the one-day OpenAI DevDay event, which will feature a keynote address and breakout sessions led by members of OpenAI’s technical staff, OpenAI said in a blog post that it’ll preview “new tools and exchange ideas” — but left the rest to the imagination.
News of GPT-5, the presumed name of OpenAI’s next flagship generative AI model, is unlikely — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed in April that OpenAI wasn’t training GPT-5 and “wouldn’t for some time.” But we might learn more about OpenAI’s plans for Global Illumination, the AI design studio that it acquired in August, and an update on the availability of GPT-4’s image understanding capabilities. (While GPT-4, OpenAI’s current leading model, can technically analyze and interpret images, OpenAI has reportedly been holding the image-processing capabilities back on fears of privacy issues.)This reporter wouldn’t be surprised to see new techniques for watermarking AI-generated content, too, as fears of misinformative, plagiaristic AI-generated content at scale grow. OpenAI recently pulled its in-house tool to detect AI-generated text due to poor performance; perhaps we’ll get some sort of successor at DevDay.
While DevDay will be a largely in-person affair, parts of the conference, including the keynote, will be streamed online. Registration will open in the coming weeks, with attendance to be capped at “hundreds” of developers, OpenAI says.
“We’re looking forward to showing our latest work to enable developers to build new things,” Altman said in a canned statement.
Why host a developer day? In the blog post, OpenAI makes the case that its developer community is large enough to justify it. Over 2 million developers use the startup’s range of generative AI tools, including its large language models GPT-4 and ChatGPT, text-to-image model DALL-E 2 and automatic speech recognition model Whisper.
Developer conferences are also a marketing opportunity. And OpenAI is on the hunt for a commercial win.While ChatGPT achieved global fame, OpenAI — backed by billions in venture capital from Microsoft and major VC players — allegedly spent upward of $540 million last year to develop it, including funds it used to poach talent from the likes of Google and Meta, according to The Information.
The company appears to be well on the path to profitability — reportedly, it could bring in $1 billion in revenue next year — but with the competition increasing and the cost of AI hardware skyrocketing, OpenAI can’t afford to rest on its laurels.
