👑 OpenAI’s Rise To Power

OpenAI is the third most valuable startup in the world

And the number 1 most valuable AI startup

It is valued at around 80 billion

But did you know that Elon Musk was one of the co-founders of OpenAI?

Non-profit Beginnings

2015–2018

OpenAI was initially founded in 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman 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.”

The company assembled a team of the best researchers in the field of AI to pursue the goal of building AGI in a safe way.

The early years of OpenAI were marked with rapid experimentation.

The company made significant progress on research in deep learning and reinforcement learning, and released ‘OpenAI Gym’ in 2016

A toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms. 

OpenAI showcased the capabilities of these reinforcement learning algorithms through its ‘OpenAI Five’ project in 2018, which trained five independent AI agents to play a complex multiplayer online battle arena game called ‘Dota 2’.

Despite operating independently, these agents learned to work as a cohesive team to coordinate strategies within the game.

A crucial development occurred in June 2018. The company released a paper titled "Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training", which introduced the foundational architecture for the Generative Pre-trained Transformer model.

This later evolved into ChatGPT, the company’s flagship product.

Starting to get Serious

2019

In 2019, OpenAI transitioned from a non-profit to a “capped-profit” model.

According to the company’s blog post in 2019, OpenAI wanted to increase its ability to raise capital while still serving its mission, and “no pre-existing legal structure they knew of struck the right balance”.

Per the IRS, for-profit entities and not-for-profit entities are fundamentally at odds with each other, so in order to combine the two competing concepts, OpenAI came up with a novel structure which allowed the non-profit to control the direction of a for-profit entity while providing the investors a "capped" upside of 100x.

This culminated in a $1Bn investment from Microsoft, marking the beginning of a key strategic relationship, but complicating the company’s organizational structure and incentives. 

The non-profit entity, OpenAI Inc., became the sole controlling shareholder of the new for-profit entity OpenAI Global LLC

Which answered to the board of the nonprofit and retained a fiduciary responsibility to the company’s nonprofit charter.

Crucially, the board was responsible for determining when OpenAI attained artificial general intelligence (AGI)

Which the company defines as a “highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.”

Fitting its Boots

Becoming ChatGPT- 2020-2023

In 2020, bolstered by new funding, OpenAI unveiled GPT-3, a large language model (LLM) capable of understanding and generating convincing human-like text.

This was a watershed moment for OpenAI and the broader AI community.

As the company grew, its LLMs continued to become larger and more intelligent. 

However, OpenAI's innovation didn't stop with language models.

In 2021, the company expanded its horizons by launching Codex, a specialized AI model for programming, and DALL-E, an AI system adept at creating original artwork from text descriptions.

December 2022 marked another major milestone for OpenAI with the release of GPT-3

Laying the groundwork for the consumer-focused application ‘Chat-GPT’.

Chat-GPT rapidly captured global attention, becoming the fastest app to amass 100 million users within just two months of its launch.

Capitalizing on this success, OpenAI introduced a subscription model and unveiled its most sophisticated model yet, GPT-4, ~10x more advanced than its predecessor and capable of analyzing text, images, and voice.

Further developer tools and a turbocharged version of GPT-4 were announced at the company’s Developer Day on November 6th, 2023.

The devastating shock

2023

If you don’t know the wild thing that happened last year with OpenAI, I will keep you on the in and let you know real quick

In short, OpenAI's board of directors removed co-founder and chief executive Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) after the board had no confidence in his leadership. 

And fortunately was reinstated 5 days later after being fired - Strange?!

💭 Quote of the Week 

❝ 

 It's better to fail than to never try at all

^{Sam Altman}

Welcome, again, to 1 more new Legend this week

You know who you are and welcome

Wanna check out OpenAI’s official introduction letter released in 2015?

Here it is: https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai 

Keep Embracing the Future, One Byte at a Time! 🔄

See you next week