OpenAI, one of the hottest tech companies in AI, has said that its first international office will be set up in London. By opening in the city, it expects to broaden the scope of its operations and accelerate its mission towards artificial general intelligence (AGI).
“We see this expansion as an opportunity to attract world-class talent and drive innovation in AGI development and policy,” adds Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.
“We’re excited about what the future holds and to see the contributions our London office will make towards building and deploying safe AI.”
The company already has four positions open in London according to its careers page. The job titles include ‘Account Executive’, ‘Software Engineer, Detection & Response’, ‘Solutions Architect’, and ‘UK Policy and Partnerships Lead’.
The company said that London has great talent which makes it an ideal place for the company. It said the teams in London will focus on leading-edge research and engineering capabilities as well as collaborating with local communities and policymakers.
“We are thrilled to extend our research and development footprint into London, a city globally renowned for its rich culture and exceptional talent pool,” says Diane Yoon, OpenAI’s VP of People.
“We are eager to build dynamic teams in Research, Engineering, and Go-to-Market functions, as well as other areas, to reinforce our efforts in creating and promoting safe AGI.”
Sam Altman has previously criticized the European Union for attempting to over-regulate the AI space – this could be a key part of why the company has decided to set up in London instead where the EU’s AI rules don’t apply.
Just like Google Bard, OpenAI now publishes regular updates about improvements it is making to ChatGPT. It’s premium subscribers get new features and language models first but there’s a free tier which gets improvements all the time too. The engineers the company hires in London will help with these improvements.