OpenAI, a private artificial intelligence research laboratory, responsible for the language model that has been fine-tuned for the task of chatting with humans ChatGPT allegedly used Kenyan workers earning less than $2 per hour to make the software less toxic.
In an exclusive investigative piece done by Time Magazine showed OpenAI which in 2021 was valued at $1 billion sent tens of thousands of snippets of text to an outsourcing firm in Kenya, beginning in November 2021.
According to Time Magazine, “OpenAI’s outsourcing partner in Kenya was Sama, a San Francisco-based firm that employs workers in Kenya, Uganda and India to label data for Silicon Valley clients like Google, Meta and Microsoft. Sama markets itself as an “ethical AI” company and claims to have helped lift more than 50,000 people out of poverty.”
OpenAI is now reportedly in talks with investors to raise funds at a $29 billion valuation, including a potential $10 billion investment by Microsoft.
