What Is OpenAI And Why Was it Formed?

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory that was initially founded to be a non-profit company. It was founded in December 2015 by several high-profile figures in the tech industry, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba.

OpenAI's formation was driven by a shared belief among its founders in the potential benefits of artificial intelligence, as well as the potential risks if it is not developed and deployed responsibly. It was established as a non-profit organisation, with an initial commitment of $1 billion in funding from its founders.

The organisation's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. AGI refers to highly autonomous systems that are capable of outperforming humans at the most economically valuable work. OpenAI commits to using any influence it obtains over AGI’s deployment to make sure it is used for the benefit of all, and to avoid harmful uses or undue concentration of power.

In March 2020, OpenAI transitioned from its pure non-profit nature to a "capped-profit" model with the establishment of the for-profit OpenAI LP, which is managed by the non-profit OpenAI Inc. This change was intended to attract more funding and talent to achieve its mission in the face of increasing competition.

OpenAI has developed several notable AI systems, including the GPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer) series, which includes GPT-1, GPT-2, and GPT-3, the latter being one of the largest and most powerful language models to date. These models are capable of tasks such as translation, question-answering, and even creating original content, such as writing essays or poems. The latest model for GPT is version 4.

Why was OpenAI formed?

OpenAI was formed to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) — a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at the most economically valuable work — benefits all of humanity. The organization's founders recognized the profound potential of AGI, along with the risks associated with its development and deployment, especially if it were to be controlled by a small group of people or organisations.

OpenAI's mission statement outlines several core principles:

1. Broadly distributed benefits: OpenAI commits to using any influence it obtains over AGI’s deployment to ensure that it benefits everyone, and to avoid uses of AI or AGI that could harm humanity or concentrate power unduly.

2. Long-term safety: OpenAI is committed to researching how to make AGI safe, and to driving the adoption of safety measures across the AI community.

3. Technical leadership: OpenAI aims to be on the cutting edge of AI capabilities to effectively address AGI's impact on society.

4. Cooperative orientation: OpenAI actively cooperates with other research and policy institutions and aims to create a global community working together to tackle AGI’s global challenges.

The formation of OpenAI reflects a proactive approach to the societal impact of AGI, addressing issues of safety, ethics, and fair distribution of benefits at the forefront of AGI development rather than after its realisation.

What are some important OpenAI derivatives?

ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a powerful language model developed by OpenAI. It belongs to the GPT-3.5 architecture, which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3.5. With its extensive training on a wide range of internet text, it has the ability to generate human-like responses and engage in natural conversations with users.

At its core, ChatGPT utilizes a transformer neural network, an architecture that allows it to process and understand sequential data, such as text, with remarkable efficiency. It employs a large number of attention layers, which enable it to capture contextual dependencies and generate coherent and contextually appropriate responses.

The training process for ChatGPT involves exposure to a diverse range of internet text, enabling it to acquire knowledge on various topics. However, it's important to note that ChatGPT's responses are based on patterns and information learned during training, rather than genuine comprehension or understanding. Therefore, it may occasionally produce incorrect or nonsensical answers.

OpenAI has made efforts to improve the ethical and responsible use of ChatGPT by refining its behaviour and addressing issues related to bias, misinformation, and harmful content. They aim to strike a balance between providing useful and engaging interactions while avoiding potential risks associated with the misuse of AI technology. You can log in to chat GPT here,

DALL-E

Dall-E is a variant of GPT-3, an AI model developed by OpenAI, specifically designed to generate images from textual descriptions. It has the ability to create images of things that don't exist, yet are described in a coherent manner. This is achieved by training the model on a large dataset containing many images and their corresponding textual descriptions.

We are currently on the second generation, also known as DALL - E2, which was launched in September 2022.

The capabilities of DALL-E include:

1. Generating original, realistic images from textual descriptions, even combining disparate concepts in a single image.

2. Extending an image beyond its original canvas to create new compositions.

3. Making realistic edits to existing images based on textual instructions, such as adding or removing elements while accounting for details like shadows, reflections, and textures.

4. Creating different variations of a given image inspired by the original.
   

Whisper

Whisper is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system developed by OpenAI. ASR technology is essentially what transcribes spoken language into written text, and it has a wide range of applications, including transcription services, voice assistants, and more.

Whisper was trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitasking supervised data collected from the web. As of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, OpenAI had announced that the Whisper ASR API was being made available for developers to use.

Codex

OpenAI Codex is a descendant of the GPT-3 model and is specialised for interpreting and generating code.

OpenAI Codex can translate natural language instructions into code in a variety of programming languages. This has made it useful in applications like creating code snippets for specific tasks, tutoring in various programming languages, and even powering the AI behind OpenAI's ChatGPT.

In August 2021, OpenAI launched the Codex API waitlist and introduced a new product called GitHub Copilot, which is powered by Codex. GitHub Copilot is an AI-powered code completion tool that helps programmers write code faster and with fewer errors.

However, it's important to note that while Codex is a powerful tool, it is not without limitations. Codex sometimes produces incorrect or nonsensical code, and its performance can vary across different programming languages. It also does not understand the context of the code outside of the provided prompt, and it requires explicit instructions for the best results.

If you would like to learn the fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning, then you can read this article to better help you understand those concepts.