• OpenAI's biggest challenge today is turning the enthusiasm for artificial intelligence into "actual business products," Oliver Jay, the company's managing director of international strategy, said at CNBC's CONVERGE LIVE Thursday.
• He said that working with large language models is a "new paradigm" that needs guardrails, and that safety and moderation issues must be considered.
• He also spoke about the rapid uptick in OpenAI's ChatGPT usage at the two-day live event in Singapore — adding that the city-state has the highest per-capita usage of the chatbot in the world

Unlike many other companies, OpenAI does not struggle with market demand, Oliver Jay, managing director of international strategy at OpenAI, said at CNBC's CONVERGE LIVE Thursday.

Instead, "the biggest challenge right now is ... converting that enthusiasm into real-life production-ready use case," he said. "The gap is AI fluency — to know how to turn these concepts into actual business products."

He said this is difficult because "working with large language models is a new paradigm. It's not software. You need to build guardrails."

He also spoke about the rapid uptick in ChatGPT usage at the two-day live event in Singapore — adding that the city-state has the highest per-capita usage of ChatGPT in the world. Last October, OpenAI announced plans to open an office in Singapore.

He said that artificial intelligence presents a special opportunity for all companies, but specifically those in Asia.

"This is the first time Asian companies, potentially, can take a leadership role on a global stage," he said. "Traditionally, you see technology adopted in Silicon Valley first, and then Europe. ... Now there could be a company from Asia that will be the most innovative."

'Tremendous demand'

OpenAI's head of international strategy also said the artificial intelligence giant was seeing "tremendous demand in the market across all segments."

"It's a rollercoaster. We're just trying to keep up with the demand," he said.

Unlike other platform shifts — such as software as a service (SAAS) or the cloud — which had early and late adopters, Jay said: "We're seeing AI being adopted everywhere all at once."

"Consumers, businesses, educators, developers and you can see this in the metrics of one of our products, ChatGPT. ChatGPT recently exceeded 400 million weekly active users," he added.

"AI is not this mercurial mystery. It's actually ready," he said. "Companies are being transformed already," Jay said.

ChatGPT is an AI chatbot developed by San Francisco-based OpenAI that uses deep learning techniques to generate human-like responses to inputs. OpenAI was co-founded in 2015 by Elon Musk and Sam Altman and is backed by well-known investors — most notably Microsoft.

— Ryan Browne contributed to this report