Time flies: OpenAI has been shaping the future of artificial intelligence much longer than you think

A few years ago artificial intelligence was talked about but it really didn’t seem to affect the everyday lives of the majority of people. However, that changed with the advent of ChatGPT.

It also brought to the consciousness of the world a little-known entity outside of the IT industry and technophiles, OpenAI. However, the technology company has been working over the past decade to shape how artificial intelligence is developed.

The birth of OpenAI

OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman along with Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba. The technology company started off as a non-profit organization with the stated goal to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole.”

With an early investment of $1.1 billion, OpenAI went about bringing a team of AI experts to develop artificial generative intelligence in a safe way. The aim was to foster collaboration and make the results of their work accessible to the world.

OpenAI made rapid strides with deep learning and reinforcement learning. That led to the 2016 release of ‘OpenAI Gym’, a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms.

Two years later, it demonstrated those capabilities with its ‘OpenAI Five’ project. Five independent AI agents that were trained to play a complex game, learned to work together cohesively despite being separate from each other.

The same year as the OpenAI Five project, 2018, Musk resigned his seat on the board citing potential conflicts of interest due to Tesla’s work on self-driving cars.

You may also be interested in: Is ChatGPT having “robot dreams”?

OpenAI transitions to a ‘capped-profit’ model

Seeking to increase its ability to raise capital but not lose its non-profit status, OpenAI transitioned to a novel ‘capped-profit’ model. This allowed investors to get a capped return on their investment in a for-profit entity while the non-profit maintained full control of the new entity’s operations.

Chamath Palihapitiya, venture capitalist and entrepreneur and co-host of the business and technology podcast All-In, detailed the structure of the OpenAI in a 2023 substack blog post.

OpenAI launches ChatGPT

The real spotlight shown on OpenAI when in December 2022 it launched ChatGPT-3, a large language model that could understand human-generated text and produce text of its own that almost seemed human. Within two months, 100 million people were using the chat bot.

This was in addition to other AI tools it had released, Dall-E for creating images and Codex for programming.

Not long after ChatGPT-3 was available to the public, OpenAI introduced a subscription model for an even more souped-up ChatGPT-4 that could also analyze images and voice in addition to text.

A bump in the road before OpenAI’s value soars

Towards the end of 2023 OpenAI experienced a bit of turbulence as it reached for the stratosphere. The biggest shock though came when Altman was ousted as CEO on 17 November along with other executives.

That prompted prominent resignations including co-founder and President Greg Brockman. However, five days later Altman was back at the helm after investors, including Microsoft, and employees protested his firing.

The following year OpenAI made history when it completed the largest round of fund raising in history. The company raked in $7.26 billion giving it a valuation of $172 billion and positioning it as the top AI company.

Get your game on! Whether you’re into NFL touchdowns, NBA buzzer-beaters, world-class soccer goals, or MLB home runs, our app has it all.

Dive into live coverage, expert insights, breaking news, exclusive videos, and more – plus, stay updated on the latest in current affairs and entertainment.Download now for all-access coverage, right at your fingertips – anytime, anywhere.