Meeting Sam Altman at OpenAi Developer Round Table May 22, 2023 in Madrid

Yesterday we spent the day in Madrid meeting with Sam Altman and the OpenAI team as part of their world tour. We were 30 invited developers that sat down and had a one-hour conversation about what OpenAI are working on, some of the improvements that we would like to see, what is on the roadmap and how they're dealing with EU-specific issues.

No surprise, Sam Altman is a superstar. It was like seeing a rock star in action. Not during the developer meetup, but definitely afterwards as we went to the bigger conference hall with 650 people. And the meet and greet afterwards.

Just before coming to the meeting they just met with the Spanish government and they are keeping a close eye on what's happening with the European AI bill that's being worked on. They are hopeful that Europe will not get cut off from generative models.

In terms of their product roadmap, the number one thing on their mind is speed and latency. That's also their number one request, both from developers and from ourselves.

One of the most interesting and relevant aspects of the roadmap for us is the Sam mentioned that within this year they will be launching a voice interface, which is surprisingly fast and allows you to interact with GPT using voice like a real conversation. This will be available using the API as well.

We also connected with Mo, one of the research scientists at OpenAI, who promised to give us access to the 32K model, even though that will not be production ready.

We had a couple of people getting very excited, and especially one of the attendees, another fellow entrepreneur, who has a mother with Alzheimers. When he heard that we're building a digital twin that possibly could help with the communication challenges, he was overly excited. This made us discover another very important use case to deal with family members that need support and help.

We also discussed the opportunity of using channels. We've already seen people building stuff using Telegram, and during the meetup I met another developer that has been building a WhatsApp version of ChatGPT. This made me think about the opportunity for us to use WhatsApp as an access point to what we're building - more to come on that soon.

Altogether it was a high energy trip back and forth to Madrid over the day, and super exciting to be part of this small but very interesting community of 30 AI driven developers.