A Comprehensive Guide to OpenAI: Everything You Need to Know

Introduction to OpenAI

OpenAI, Renowned artificial intelligence research and development business OpenAI started out as a non-profit. Based in San Francisco, its goal is to build highly powerful artificial intelligences “human-friendly” and useful for society. In what way does OpenAI operate?

Among other investors, Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX) and Sam Altman (Y Combinator) co-founded and gave early contributions for this business. Though he kept helping, Elon Musk finally quit his post due of conflicts of interest with Tesla.

Unique Aspects of OpenAI:

1. OpenAI does not always make its AIs easily available for public consumption in order to avoid damaging use (disinformation campaigns, impersonating genuine people, etc.). Silicon Valley behemoths funded this project largely out of fear about damaging artificial intelligence, also known as strong artificial intelligence—AI that is aware.

What is OpenAI Used For? A Look Back at the Key Moments Since Its Creation

Reinforcement Learning

In a previous article, we defined reinforcement learning and presented its growing possibilities. It logically follows that OpenAI decided to develop several AI projects related to this technology:

In 2016, OpenAI developed a reinforcement learning library and toolkit called OpenAI Gym. The goal is to more easily develop agents (machines, for example) that perform actions as well as or better than humans. OpenAI notably encourages the use of Gym to improve business processes, such as optimizing warehouses, summarizing reports, and even assisting doctors in prescribing medications.

In the context of reinforcement learning, OpenAI achieved the feat of creating an artificial intelligence that beats the best players in one of the most complex video games: Dota 2. Unlike traditional board games such as chess or Go (turn-based systems with complete information), Dota 2 is a continuous-time video game with a continuous space and incomplete information, exponentially increasing the game’s complexity. The possibilities are infinitely numerous, requiring more computing power and a much longer training time.

OpenAI began in 2018 by developing an AI that beats humans in 1v1 matches, which is not the main game mode. Later, with OpenAI Five, it succeeded in winning 5v5 matches in 2019 against the best players in the world. This remarkable achievement is reminiscent of competitor DeepMind, which also developed an AI that ranks among the best players in the world at Starcraft 2.

Such performances show how AI can surpass humans in tasks that seemingly require advanced human intelligence.

Other Milestones for OpenAI:

• The Development of GPT-2: The successor to the GPT model, GPT-2 allows for the logical continuation of any text. (An upcoming article on the GPT model will be on the blog soon.) A flagship product of OpenAI, it can generate coherent works of fiction, such as writing a complete sequel to the first sentence of the novel “1984.”
• A Partnership with Microsoft in 2019: This partnership injected $1 billion to help OpenAI with funding issues while collaborating on new computing technologies.
• The Release of GPT-3 in July 2020: This new version of the transformer-based language model was controversial. Some consider it revolutionary due to its superior power compared to GPT-2, while others are skeptical. More information on GPT-3 will be available in a future article.

Controversy

GPT-2 was controversial because OpenAI publicized the potential dangers of this model, initially deciding not to share the complete architecture and mentioning possible risks, such as theoretically creating a massive disinformation campaign. However, the entire model was later shared with the public. While the technology proved to be very effective, it was not as dangerous or revolutionary as initially feared. OpenAI was accused of overhyping its models to gain attention.

OpenAI’s initial nature was non-profit, aiming to conduct research free from financial goals. However, to excel in its field, OpenAI must finance its costly projects. Thus, OpenAI created a new for-profit entity, OpenAI LP, to attract investments, which disappointed some who saw this as a shift in vision. Nevertheless, the talents at OpenAI still aim for AI to benefit humanity, and a compromise that maintains this vision while securing necessary funding must be reached.

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