OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT: What all it does, how it started and more – Times of India

In the last couple of months, ChatGPT has become the talk of the tech town. The AI-trained chatbot can generate human-like text and has impressed many people. ChatGPT is developed by OpenAI. But how did OpenAI come into existence? What does it do? We answer all these questions and more
How did OpenAI come into existence?
OpenAI is a private artificial intelligence research organization founded in December 2015 by Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and Elon Musk. Yes, the Elon Musk was a founder member of OpenAI. The whole idea behind forming OpenAI was to develop and promote friendly AI in a responsible way. The founders believed that AI has the potential to help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems.
Who are the co-founders and main investors at Open AI ?
OpenAI’s founders include Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and Elon Musk. Sam Altman is the president of Y Combinator and a co-founder of OpenAI. Greg Brockman is the CEO of OpenAI and was previously the president and CTO of Cloudera. Ilya Sutskever is a renowned AI researcher who has worked on deep learning and neural networks. Wojciech Zaremba is a research scientist at OpenAI and a leading expert in natural language processing. Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, is also a co-founder of OpenAI.
OpenAI has attracted funding from a number of high-profile investors. Apart from its co-founders, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen were also early investors.
What kind of work has OpenAI done?
It started off as a research-based organisation in the field of AI. However, it later developed GPT-2, a language model that can generate human-like text, and the development of OpenAI Gym, a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms.
In addition to its research and development efforts, OpenAI also engages in policy work, education and outreach, and the development of AI applications. The company also maintains a number of partnerships with other organisations working in the field of AI, including Microsoft, Google, and IBM.
What was Elon Musk’s role at OpenAI?
Musk is one of the co-founders of OpenAI. He was involved with the company since its inception in December 2015. However, in 2018, Musk resigned from OpenAI’s board of directors due to potential future conflicts (of interest) with his companies Tesla and SpaceX which are developing artificial intelligence technology.
When he resigned, he did say that he planned to continue to donate to the organisation. However, his stance may have changed as recently he did say he thought OpenAI was more on the “non-profit” side of things. Back then Musk in a statement, said “I didn’t agree with some of what the OpenAI team wanted to do. I didn’t want to be a representative of the company. I don’t want to be associated with it. I’m not trying to be anyone’s saviour. I just want to help in my own way.”
What is Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI?
In the last two months, experts have said that Microsoft’s initial investment in OpenAI could turn to be a masterstroke. Microsoft first announced a “strategic partnership” with OpenAI in 2019. The partnership aimed to bring OpenAI’s advanced AI technologies and capabilities to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, making it easier for developers and businesses to access and use OpenAI’s AI models and tools.

As part of the partnership, Microsoft invested in OpenAI and the two companies have collaborated on a number of AI-related projects and initiatives. Only recently, Microsoft announced a multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, further outlining its deeper involvement with the company. “We formed our partnership with OpenAI around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratize AI as a new technology platform,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “In this next phase of our partnership, developers and organizations across industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain with Azure to build and run their applications.”
What are the other projects OpenAI has worked on?
One of the key projects of OpenAI has been DALL-E, another AI model. DALL-E is a generative model that can generate images from text descriptions. It is based on the GPT-3 model, which is one of the most advanced language models developed by OpenAI.
DALL-E uses a transformer-based architecture, which allows it to process large amounts of data and generate high-quality images. It is trained on a dataset of images and text descriptions, which enables it to understand the relationships between the two.
One of the main features of DALL-E is its ability to generate images from text descriptions that are not present in the training data. For example, if given a text description “a two-story pink house with a white fence and a red door”, DALL-E can generate an image of a house that matches that description, even if it has never seen a two-story pink house with a white fence and a red door before.

DALL-E is also capable of generating images from more abstract text descriptions, such as “a robot that looks like a giraffe” or “a car that looks like a spaceship.”
DALL-E has been released as an API, which allows developers to generate images from text descriptions in real time, making it easy for them to integrate the technology into their own applications.
The other model is OpenAI Five, which is capable of playing Dota 2 — a really popular game — at a high level and competing against professional players.
Do note that Dota 2 is a complex and challenging game that requires players to make strategic decisions, coordinate with their team, and react quickly to changing conditions on the battlefield. OpenAI Five is designed to play the game in a similar way to human players, using a combination of deep learning and reinforcement learning techniques.
OpenAI Five is trained using a combination of supervised learning, where it is trained on historical game data, and reinforcement learning, where it learns by playing the game against itself. This allows the model to learn the strategic elements of the game, as well as the tactical skills required to succeed.
The model has been able to defeat professional players in exhibition matches.