Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

by Karen Hao

another lesson to be drawn from Te Hiku’s experience that the three hundred ten hours still proved sufficient for developing the very first te reo speech-recognition model with 86 percent accuracy. Where OpenAI seeks to develop singular massive AI models that will do anything, a quest that necessarily hoovers up as much data as possible, Te Hiku simply sought to create a small, specialized model that excels at one thing. In addition, Te Hiku benefited from the cross-border, open-source AI community: As its starting point, it used a free speech-recognition model from the Mozilla Foundation called DeepSpeech, which itself is an artifact of a different vision of AI development. Like Te Hiku, Mozilla trained the model only on data donated with full consent and built it using a neural network architecture developed by the Bay Area–based research lab of the Chinese company Baidu. In all, Te Hiku used only two GPUs.