What Is OpenAI? (2024)
What Is OpenAI?
OpenAI is an innovative startup and a private research laboratory that aim to research, develop and deploy artificial intelligence (AI) to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all the humanity. The company was founded back in 2015 by Elon Musk and Sam Altman with other well-known enterpreneurs and the headquarter of the company is in San Francisco.
OpenAI was created because of its founders concern about the potential catastrophe resulting from carelessness and misuse of artificial intelligence. The founders and other investors started OpenAI with a $1 billion endowment. While the company was contuining its research in february 2018, Elon Musk had to left the startup due to a potential conflict with his role and work at Tesla -- the automotive and clean energy company inspired to Nikola Tesla.
The company official goal is -- to work toward safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) for benefit of humanity. Every research and patents made by OpenAI are intended to remain open-source unless in cases where the technology could negatively affect the society.
What Is The History And The Ttimeline Of OpenAI Till 2024?
Sam Altman (the current CEO of OpenAI), with Greg Brockman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk (the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, Neuralink and the Boring Company), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research announced the formation of OpenAI and seek to raise over $1 billion for the venture. However the actual collect amount from its contributors was only $130 millions until 2019. From 2015 OpenAI is focused on research and development of AI, the was originally focused on developing AI and machine learning tools for recreational purposes. In April 2016 OpenAI released a public beta of "OpenAI Gym" -- which were reinforcement learning (RI) algorithms. In the next two years OpenAI changed the focus on researching and developing generative AI and AGI research. In December 2016 OpenAI also revealed and released "Universe" a software platform for measuring and training an AI's general intelligence across the world's supply of games, websites, and other applications.
In 2018, Elon Musk resigned from his board seat, revealing a potential future conflict of interests with his role as CEO of Tesla due to Tesla's AI development for its self-driving cars. In the same year 2018, OpenAI published a research paper where it was explained what a Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) is. A GPT is a neural network, or a machine learning model, created to function like a human brain and trained on input, such as large data sets, to produce outputs -- i.e., answers to users' questions.
In february 2019, OpenAI announced GPT-2 which was a model able to generate sentences with human-like text, based on the prompted text. In March 2019, the company switched from nonprofit to for-profit status and became formally known as OpenAI LP, controlled by parent company OpenAI Inc.
In 2020, OpenAI announced GPT-3, a language model trained on large internet datasets.
In Januray 2021, the company introduced DALL-E, a generative AI model able to generate complex digital image based on textual descriptions, utilizing a variant of the GPT-3 architecture.
In November 2022 OpenAI released ChatGPT, the world's most advanced chatbot based on GPT-3.5 and known for its ability to provide answers to users on a seemingly unlimited range of topics. Its benefits and drawbacks, as well as its uses in various industries, are still being debated.
In January 2023, Microsoft announced an investment of $10 billion in OpenAI over the years. In February 2023 Microsoft announced that it was building AI technology based on the same foundation as ChatGPT into Microsoft Bing, Edge, Microsoft 365 and other products.
On November 2023, Sam Altman was fired from his position by the board of directors, citing that Altman was not candid in his communications to the board. Soon after, Greg Brockman left the company. Both were hired by Microsoft three days after leaving the company. After the event three OpenAI senior researchers director of research and GPT-4 lead Jakub Pachocki, head of AI risk Aleksander Madry, and researcher Szymon Sidor resigned. Three day after Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were hired by Microsoft. These events created a chain effect making 738 of OpenAI's 770 employees to sign an open letter stating that they would quit their jobs and eventually join Microsoft if the board did not re-hired Sam Altman as CEO. On November 21, 2023, after continued negotiations, Altman and Brockman returned to the company in their prior roles along with a reconstructed board made up of new members Bret Taylor (as chairman) and Lawrence Summers, with D'Angelo remaining.
What Projects OpenAI Has Released That Are Notable ?
OpenAI has been deemed revolutionary for most of it notable products which include the followings:
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DALLE-2 and DALL-E 3. These generative AI tools can analyze text-based prompts of images that users want them to produce and then generate those images exactly as described. The models have also the capabilities to modify already existing images and impainting with new generated content.
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ChatGPT, GPT-4 and GPT-4 Vision. ChatGPT, GPT-4 and GPT-4 Vision are currently the most advanced AI chatbot designed for generating humanlike text, analyze images, documents and producing answers to users' questions that OpenAI has ever released. Having been trained on large data sets, it can generate answers and responses the way a human would. Since its creation, updates to this tool have allowed it to communicate with users through voice conversation and images.
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Sora. The most advanced AI model that can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions. The models has also the abilities to recognize prompted videos and fill with frames in case the original video has some frames missing or even modify the original video with new content. The model is highly advanced and can produce cinematic content up to 1 minute of length.
Elon Musk sues OpenAI
In a lawsuit filed on February 2024 with a San Francisco court, Elon Musk’s lawyers stated that the tech billionaire in 2015 agreed to form a nonprofit lab with Sam Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman with the mission that the company would develop artificial general intelligence for the “benefit of humanity.” However in lawsuit filing has been said that "To this, OpenAI, Inc.‘s website continues to profess that its charter is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.’ In reality, however, OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft", citing also that OpenAI's focus switched from their goal to maximizing profits. Elon Musk's lawyers said the lawsuit was submitted to make OpenAI adhere to the Founding Agreement and return to its originary mission to develop AGI for benefits humanity."