OpenAI, originally a nonprofit aiming to promote the responsible development of artificial intelligence, has evolved into a capped-profit company to achieve its mission. Co-founder Greg Brockman shares the story behind OpenAI's transformation and the development of the widely popular ChatGPT.
Key Takeaways:
- OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit by Elon Musk and Sam Altman in 2015, with a mission to share AI research with anyone for free.
- The company realized they needed scale and means to achieve their goals, which led to the creation of a capped-profit subsidiary called OpenAI LP.
- Raising billions of dollars for infrastructure and supercomputers as a nonprofit proved difficult, leading to the decision to establish a capped-profit structure.
- OpenAI LP is owned by the nonprofit, which ensures the majority of the nonprofit board members do not have profit interests to maintain their mission.
- The development of ChatGPT began in 2016, when researcher Alec Radford started working on chatbots and language models.
- ChatGPT's launch in November 2022 was met with success, quickly reaching a billion page views.
- OpenAI has released multiple versions of ChatGPT since its launch, working on improving factuality and addressing glitches.