OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Friday that his company had no plans to leave the European Union, reversing a statement made earlier this week to leave the region if it becomes too hard to comply with upcoming laws on artificial intelligence, the Reuters news agency reported.
OpenAI, the firm behind the massively popular ChatGPT service, is on shaky territory in the EU, where work is under way on what could be the first set of rules globally to govern artificial intelligence (AI), Reuters said.
Altman is now on a global tour to charm leaders and powerbrokers and calm fears over AI while exploring locations in Europe for a new office, according to Reuters.
'Poland would be an interesting place'
“Poland would be an interesting place,” he said earlier this week on the sidelines of an event hosted by the University of Warsaw and Poland’s National Centre for Research and Development.
“We want to do a research and engineering office in Europe, not a regulatory one,” he told Bloomberg News.
“We are trying to figure it out,” he added. "This is part of the goal of this trip."
The observer.com website wrote that "Altman’s interest in Poland is unconventional but not totally out of left field,” pointing to a handful of tech companies that have research and development centres in Poland, including Google, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft.
Earlier this week, US digital payments giant Visa announced plans to open a new Global Product and Technology Hub in Poland, its first such facility in Central and Eastern Europe.
In his interview with Bloomberg, Altman also said that the “talent density” of any potential location of a new office would be a key factor.
Speaking at the University of Warsaw, flanked by Polish computer scientist Wojciech Zaremba, who is an OpenAI co-founder, and researcher Szymon Sidor, Altman praised Polish IT specialists.
“I don’t know what Poland does as a culture and a system to create such incredible engineering and research talent and also such rigor, which has been, I think, very important to OpenAI’s success, but it’s quite remarkable the impact that it’s had,” he said, as quoted by therecursive.com website.
Sidor further elaborated on Poland’s significant impact on the company, saying that in its early stages OpenAI employed about 10 Polish engineers out of 50 in total.
While in Poland, Altman met with Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki to discuss "the development of AI and possibilities for Polish companies to participate in this process," according to the Polish Prime Minister's Office.
The two also talked about "issues related to legal regulations concerning the use of AI," according to officials.
(mo/gs)
Source: PAP, Reuters, therecursive.com, observer.com