President-elect Donald Trump could become "this generation's president of AI" because he will take office at a time when critical infrastructure to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) is being built, according to OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar.
"He's going to be at the starting point of AI, even at the point where AGI and other AI are developed to a certain stage," she said on Tuesday, referring to autonomous systems that outperform humans in most economically valuable tasks. She also downplayed public threats to the makers of ChatGPT from Elon Musk, one of Trump's closest advisers.
In an interview at the Reuters NEXT conference in New York, Friar responded to Reuters Editor-in-Chief Alessandra Galloni's question about Musk's threats: "We trust him... as a competitor, he will put national interests first and engage in competition appropriately."
Musk is one of the co-founders of OpenAI and has publicly opposed significant reforms to OpenAI's corporate structure to eliminate control of its nonprofit board. He now runs OpenAI's competitor xAI and has become a close advisor to Trump's transition team.
Trump chose to lead a special task force aimed at cutting government spending and regulations alongside former Republican presidential candidate and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
Friar, who previously led the social media company Nextdoor and joined OpenAI six months ago as the first Chief Financial Officer, stated that there is huge demand for the video generation tool Sora released this week. Since then, account creation has been on hold, and Friar did not provide a specific timeline for when account creation will resume.
"Some reasons are simply that we need the capability, but many reasons are also that we want to be measured... Only a small portion of people can use it today because we want to listen and learn," Friar said, adding that the company is taking a different release approach for Sora compared to ChatGPT. "In some areas, we will be slower to ensure safety first."
In addition to video generation, she said she expects more artificial intelligence agent products – software programs that autonomously perform tasks for users – to be released in the new year, which can handle everyday work, and the foundational models will gain better reasoning capabilities.
She said: "I think we will see a lot of activity around agents next year, and I believe people will be surprised by the speed of development of this technology."
The fast-growing startup is also working to collaborate with its largest investor and technology partner, Microsoft.
Friar added: "We believe... while helping each other grow, recognizing that diversity is also a good thing for the development of the entire industry." Despite the controversies surrounding adjustments to the company's governance structure and recent executive departures, OpenAI continues to expand rapidly.
Friar said the company has seen a "re-acceleration" in ChatGPT user growth, surging from 200 million in August this year to 300 million weekly active users, thanks to the rollout of new reasoning models like o1.