OpenAI
Overview
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research lab consisting of both for-profit and non-profit arms. The organization was established in December 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba. OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.
History
OpenAI was announced in December 2015 as a non-profit company working to advance digital intelligence in a way that is safe and beneficial to humanity. The organization aims to "directly build safe and beneficial AGI, or to aid others in achieving this outcome". To effectively address AGI's impact on society, OpenAI commits to principles that include broadly distributed benefits, long-term safety, technical leadership, and cooperative orientation.
In 2019, OpenAI transitioned from a non-profit to a “capped-profit” model, establishing a for-profit arm, OpenAI LP, managed by the non-profit OpenAI Inc. This change was made to attract capital beyond what pure non-profits could, while still ensuring a focus on the mission over profits.
Research
OpenAI conducts research in a wide range of areas, including machine learning, reinforcement learning, natural language processing, robotics, and AGI safety. The organization is known for its work on large-scale models like GPT-3, a transformer-based language model that uses machine learning to produce human-like text.
OpenAI's research is conducted with a focus on long-term safety, and the organization is committed to doing the research required to make AGI safe. OpenAI also commits to driving the broad adoption of safety research across the AI community.
Products and Services
OpenAI has developed a number of products and services based on its research. These include the GPT-3 language model, which is available via an API, and the Codex model, which powers the GitHub Copilot service. OpenAI also developed the DALL-E model, which generates images from textual descriptions, and the CLIP model, which understands images and text in a unified embedding space.
Impact
OpenAI's work has had a significant impact on the field of artificial intelligence. Its research papers, models, and software tools have been widely used and cited in the AI community. OpenAI's commitment to safety and ethics in AI has also influenced the discussion around these issues in the field.
Criticism and Controversy
OpenAI has faced criticism and controversy over various issues. These include concerns about the safety and ethical implications of its research, its decision to transition to a capped-profit model, and its handling of research publication and AI model release policies.