OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization founded in
December 2015, researching artificial intelligence with the goal of developing "safe and
beneficial" artificial general intelligence, which it defines as "highly autonomous systems
that outperform humans at most economically valuable work."[4] As a leading
organization of the ongoing AI boom,[5] it has developed several large language models,
advanced image generation models, and previously, released open-source models.[6]
[7]
Its release of ChatGPT has been credited with starting the AI boom.
The organization consists of the non-profit OpenAI, Inc.[8] registered in Delaware and its
for-profit subsidiary OpenAI Global, LLC.[9] It was founded by Ilya Sutskever, Greg
Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Jessica
Livingston, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba, with Sam
Altman and Elon Musk serving as the initial Board of Directors members.[10][11]
[12]
Microsoft provided OpenAI Global, LLC with a US$1 billion investment in 2019 and a
$10 billion investment in 2023,[13][14] with a significant portion of the investment in the form
of computational resources on Microsoft's Azure cloud service.[15]
On November 17, 2023, the board removed Altman as CEO, while Brockman was
removed as chairman and then resigned as president. Four days later, both returned
after negotiations with the board, and most of the board members resigned. The new
initial board included former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor as chairman.[16] Microsoft
also obtained a non-voting board seat.[17] In June 2024, retired U.S. Army general
and National Security Agency (NSA) head, Paul Nakasone, joined the board.
History[edit]
2015–2018: Non-profit beginnings[edit]
In December 2015, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica
Livingston, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC
Research announced[18] the formation of OpenAI and pledged over $1 billion to the
venture. The actual collected total amount of contributions was only $130 million until
2019.[9] According to an investigation led by TechCrunch, Musk was its largest donor
while YC Research did not contribute anything at all.[19] The organization stated it would
"freely collaborate" with other institutions and researchers by making its patents and
research open to the public.[20][21] OpenAI is headquartered at the Pioneer Building in
the Mission District, San Francisco.[22][23]
According to Wired, Brockman met with Yoshua Bengio, one of the "founding fathers"
of deep learning, and drew up a list of the "best researchers in the field".[24] Brockman
was able to hire nine of them as the first employees in December 2015.[24] In 2016,
OpenAI paid corporate-level (rather than nonprofit-level) salaries, but did not pay AI
researchers salaries comparable to those of Facebook or Google.[24]
Microsoft's Peter Lee stated that the cost of a top AI researcher exceeds the cost of a
top NFL quarterback prospect.[24] OpenAI's potential and mission drew these
researchers to the firm; a Google employee said he was willing to leave Google for
OpenAI "partly because of the very strong group of people and, to a very large extent,
because of its mission."[24] Brockman stated that "the best thing that I could imagine
doing was moving humanity closer to building real AI in a safe way."[24] OpenAI co-
founder Wojciech Zaremba stated that he turned down "borderline crazy" offers of two
to three times his market value to join OpenAI instead.[24]
In April 2016, OpenAI released a public beta of "OpenAI Gym", its platform
for reinforcement learning research.[25] Nvidia gifted its first DGX-1 supercomputer to
OpenAI in August 2016 to help it train larger and more complex AI models with the
capability of reducing processing time from six days to two hours.[26][27] In December
2016, OpenAI 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.[28][29][30][31]
In 2017, OpenAI spent $7.9 million, or a quarter of its functional expenses, on cloud
computing alone.[32] In comparison, DeepMind's total expenses in 2017 were
$442 million. In the summer of 2018, simply training OpenAI's Dota 2 bots required
renting 128,000 CPUs and 256 GPUs from Google for multiple weeks.
In 2018, Musk resigned from his Board of Directors seat, citing "a potential
future conflict [of interest]" with his role as CEO of Tesla due to Tesla's AI development
for self-driving cars.[33] Sam Altman claims that Musk believed that OpenAI had fallen
behind other players like Google and Musk proposed instead to take over OpenAI
himself, which the board rejected. Musk subsequently left OpenAI but claimed to remain
a donor, yet made no donations after his departure.[34]
In February 2019, GPT-2 was announced, which gained attention for its ability to
generate human-like text.[35]
2019: Transition from non-profit[edit]
In 2019, OpenAI transitioned from non-profit to "capped" for-profit, with the profit being
capped at 100 times any investment.[36] According to OpenAI, the capped-profit model
allows OpenAI Global, LLC to legally attract investment from venture funds and, in
addition, to grant employees stakes in the company.[37] Many top researchers work
for Google Brain, DeepMind, or Facebook, which offer stock options that a nonprofit
would be unable to.[38] Before the transition, public disclosure of the compensation of top
employees at OpenAI was legally required.[39]
The company then distributed equity to its employees and partnered with Microsoft,
[40]
announcing an investment package of $1 billion into the company. Since then,
OpenAI systems have run on an Azure-based
