Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT was in Nigeria last weekend on his tour of tech strongholds across the world.
At an intimate event hosted at Muson centre, the former YCombinator President’s visit was to further spread the adoption and interest of AI.
The tour saw Altman have a fireside chat with some of Nigeria’s most innovative tech entrepreneurs and students of the American International School of Lagos where he shared what his company is doing to create safe and powerful AI that benefits all. Altman also admitted at the event, that, while he supported regulating the AI space, he was concerned about over regulation.
“…honestly, I’m worried about over regulation. I think it’s easier to get a new technology like this wrong by over regulating. And you want to see what the actual problems are before you address them,” he said.
Days after his visit, OpenAI announced that the ChatGPT app was now available in Nigeria and other countries like Ghana, Namibia, United Kingdom, the UAE, France, Jamaica and more. While the ChatGPT app is not yet available for Android users, OpenAI has said Android users are next.
While in Lagos, Altman also gleaned from some of Nigeria’s tech experts what OpenAI could do to better their AI products for its Nigerian community; the largest in Africa and one of the largest globally, according to him.