OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said ChatGPT is 'cool,' but it's a 'horrible product'

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said ChatGPT was "cool, for sure." JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said ChatGPT was a "horrible product" in an interview, citing the AI chatbot's outages.
• OpenAI reportedly released ChatGPT to the public as a last resort due to internal beta testing issues. 
• Altman conceded that the AI chatbot was "cool" but that it wasn't a "great, well-integrated product." 

OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman knows there are issues with his company's AI chatbot, ChatGPT. In fact, he recently called it a "horrible product" in a podcast interview. 

"People are really just going to a site that sometimes works and sometimes is down," Altman said on the New York Times tech podcast, "Hard Fork," citing ChatGPT's frequent error messages. 

"They're typing in something, they're trying until they get it right, and then they're copying that answer and going to paste it in somewhere else — and then going back and trying to integrate that with search results or their other workflows," he added, seeming to reference the product's simplistic design.  

ChatGPT has taken the internet by storm since it launched in November. It has already disrupted the education field, helping students write essays and pass exams. The bot is also fairly adept at writing job application cover letters, lines of code, and Insider articles. 

Bill Gates even said the technology in ChatGPT would "change our world." 

However, ChatGPT is also prone to breaking down; often telling users it is currently at capacity or unexpectedly rejecting their queries. 

Greg Brockman, another cofounder of OpenAI, recently said that launching ChatGPT in its current form was something of a last resort for the company after internal issues with beta testers. 

Despite the reportedly haphazard way the technology was released, it became a viral sensation virtually overnight: a week after its launch, ChatGPT had one million users, growing quicker than Instagram and TikTok. 

In his interview with "Hard Fork," Altman conceded that ChatGPT's AI technology is "cool, for sure." 

"People really love it, which makes us very happy. But no one would say this was like a great, well-integrated product yet... but there is so much value here that people are willing to put up with it," Altman said.