Infosys was one of OpenAI’s first backers, which has now become the rage thanks to Dall-E and ChatGPT. ChatGPT, which has now been used for a wide variety of purposes, saw Infosys investing in the maker — OpenAI — back in 2015. Speaking about the chatbot, Chief Executive Officer Salil Parekh during the company’s earnings on January 12, said that the company had supported the initiative with a donation.
"We see the progress and a huge congratulations on what they have done. We have examples where we are using ChatGPT with client situations and that is starting to further increase productivity and automation," he said.
Parekh added that Infosys has a huge focus and commitment through the past several years on automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning. However, he added that there is no additional investment that Infosys is looking to make into OpenAI.
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"I think we have a huge focus and commitment for the last several years on automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning. We have no plans today which relate to anything in terms of an investment in any activity,” Parekh said.
“There are many technologies which enable way to do low code, no code, enhancement of efficiency of building code faster. We're working with several of them to make sure that we work with our clients on it."
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At the time that Infosys donated to OpenAI, it was a non-profit but it restructured as a “capped-profit” company in 2019.
ChatGPT is a chatbot which can generate detailed, written text resembling human conversation and can remember earlier conversations for context. It can be asked follow-up questions, its premises can be challenged and it admits mistakes as well. The chatbot, which has captured public imagination and is the fancy of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, can also be used to write some code and debug it as well. Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s backers, is looking to invest $10 billion in the platform.
Infosys, along with Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, Greg Brockman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and YC Research had committed $1bn to OpenAI in 2015. At that time, then Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka was also an advisor to the group.
In a blogpost Sikka had written at the time (which has since been taken down), he said that in his experience with corporate research teams, he found a continual struggle for teams to find relevance with work in the “here and now”, “usually knowing that this unnecessary and premature seeking of relevance not only blinds us to those opportunities that can shift our paradigms, it defeats the point of research.”
In a section detailing why it made sense for Infosys, he said, “Most of our work is in building and maintaining software systems, and AI will increasingly shape the construction and evolution of intelligent software systems, in all kinds of domains and industries, from complex machinery to consumer behavior, from medicine to energy. In addition, as a large services company, many parts of our work can transform fundamentally with AI.”
“And just as AI helps us automate the more mundane parts of our work, AI training and building and using AI systems, can help amplify our abilities, can free us to exercise more of our creativity, our humanity,” he had added.
However, Infosys has moved away from the course charted by Sikka during his short but turbulent tenure.
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