OpenAI
California
United States
Overview
For all the mainstream attention that artificial intelligence has received over the years, very few dedicated AI companies have entered the mainstream consciousness. OpenAI represents a vanishingly rare exception to this rule.
Established in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and others, OpenAI is a non-profit research lab dedicated to the mission of building “safe and beneficial” artificial general intelligence. That’s the idea of a strong or “general” intelligence able to accomplish any intellectual task performed by humans. Backed by huge names like Microsoft, and carrying a current valuation in the vicinity of $28 billion, OpenAI’s biggest innovations to date have included the image-generating DALL-E deep learning model and of course the text-generating, large language model ChatGPT.
Of these, ChatGPT has made the biggest waves; reaching one million user sign-ups in its first five days alone and was quickly baked into Microsoft’s Bing search engine as a possible Google killer (or, at least, maimer).
Recently, OpenAI debuted GPT-4, its latest large language model—and its most impressive one so far. “Besides its ability to engage in sophisticated reasoning, GPT-4 is also multimodal,” says Tom Taulli, author of Generative AI: How ChatGPT and Other AI Tools Will Revolutionize Business. “For example, it can process an image for text and then do an analysis on it. This capability is hugely important.”
As to what’s next, the promise of true artificial general intelligence apparently beckons. OpenAI has been frank about its predictions that AI will exceed human intelligence sometime this decade. The company has put together a team, including co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and others, for “steering or controlling a potentially superintelligent AI, and preventing it from going rogue.”
Founding figure Elon Musk seemingly isn’t too happy, though. After stepping down from the OpenAI board several years ago, Musk has now launched his own apparently rival company, X.AI, of which he is the director.
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Established in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and others, OpenAI is a non-profit research lab dedicated to the mission of building “safe and beneficial” artificial general intelligence. That’s the idea of a strong or “general” intelligence able to accomplish any intellectual task performed by humans. Backed by huge names like Microsoft, and carrying a current valuation in the vicinity of $28 billion, OpenAI’s biggest innovations to date have included the image-generating DALL-E deep learning model and of course the text-generating, large language model ChatGPT.
Of these, ChatGPT has made the biggest waves; reaching one million user sign-ups in its first five days alone and was quickly baked into Microsoft’s Bing search engine as a possible Google killer (or, at least, maimer).
Recently, OpenAI debuted GPT-4, its latest large language model—and its most impressive one so far. “Besides its ability to engage in sophisticated reasoning, GPT-4 is also multimodal,” says Tom Taulli, author of Generative AI: How ChatGPT and Other AI Tools Will Revolutionize Business. “For example, it can process an image for text and then do an analysis on it. This capability is hugely important.”
As to what’s next, the promise of true artificial general intelligence apparently beckons. OpenAI has been frank about its predictions that AI will exceed human intelligence sometime this decade. The company has put together a team, including co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and others, for “steering or controlling a potentially superintelligent AI, and preventing it from going rogue.”
Founding figure Elon Musk seemingly isn’t too happy, though. After stepping down from the OpenAI board several years ago, Musk has now launched his own apparently rival company, X.AI, of which he is the director.
