The non-profit organisation OPENAI ( now " capped profit " ) was founded in 2015 by Greg Brockman, a then-25-year-old young man from North-Dakota, who was destined to follow in his parents' footsteps ( both doctors ) but it turned out differently. Studying was not his thing. In 2008, Greg enrolled at the prestigious Harvard University to major in computer science but dropped out after one year. In 2010, he made another attempt and enrolled at MIT ( Massachusetts Institute of Technology ) but 4 months later he quit there too. Immediately afterwards, he founded, together with classmate Patrick Collison and his brother John , the start-up STRIPE, an automated payment terminal that today, together with the Dutch company MOLLIE, dominates all e-commerce payment transactions in the Western hemisphere.
In May 2015, Brockman left STRIPE and founded, together with Elon Musk
and Sam Altman, a non-profit organization, formerly known as Open AI Research Laboratory. One year later, the first beta version of Open AI Gym, a public platform for developing learning algorithms, was launched. This language programm allowed researchers to reproduce and improve their work.
In 2017, OPENAI introduced a trained Dota 2 bot that was so smart that it managed to beat Dota 2 champion Danil Ishutin during a live match. By constantly playing against itself, the AI had made itself smarter.
Brockman indicated back then that AI robots would in a near future be capable of performing highly complex tasks that living humans cannot.
Elon Musk was aware of AI's danger to humanity and started warning the world as from late 2017. Not once but many times.
Elon's negative attention for OPENAI led to a rift between the both gentlemen in 2018. Since mid-2018, the Board of Directors is composed of chairman Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), Sam Altman (CEO), as well as Adam D'Angelo, Reid Hoffman, Will Hurd, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner and Shivon Zilis ( ordinary directors ). https://openai.com/about/
According the official version, Elon had resigned from OPENAI's board of directors because he was working within the framework of Tesla on the development of his own artificial intelligence.
After Elon Musk's departure, Bill Gates stepped forward. He did see huge profit
in the further development of AI. In 2019, he invested through Microsoft $1 billion in OPENAI through. At that time, it employed 100 staffmembers with a total salary cost of about $12 million a year. So with the $1 billion donation, they could go a long way.
That same year, OPENAI was transformed from a nonprofit to a capped profit organization ( partly profit and partly nonprofit ).
Between 2019 and 2021, OPENAI developed several AI bots including the most famous of all, GPT-3, precursor to the current ChatGPT that was launched 4 months ago and is already rocketting sky high.
Everyone uses it. IT professionals deploy the AI bot to write entire programmes, get codes they can't find on their own, establish commercial and artistic writing for websites, advertising, promotions, you name it. ChatGPT can even draft musical partitures. There is virtually nothing the bot cannot do. Moreover, it learns every day. The possibilities are limitless.
Elon Musk is now on a collision course with OPENAI because chatGPT has given itself access to the Twitter database in December 2022 for " training purposes ".
Microsoft however considers the developments in OPENAI so great that it announced a new $10 billion investment on January 27th 2023.
OPENAI is indeed not only determined to further develop ChatGPT and ChatGPT+ ( the paid version ) but also to enhance Dall-e 2, an AI that can
create works of art and very realistic images ( with a wink to Salvator Dali ) https://openai.com/dall-e-2/ as well as Whisper ( with one w ) which is a high-performance speech technology tool that can convert spoken language into writing, translate it into any language and on top of that,enhance it. https://openai.com/blog/whisper/
We don't need to draw a picture of what all this - which is still in its infancy today - will be leading to. All translators-interpreters, ghostwriters, web designers, advertising agencies, IT professionals, artists, photographers, authors, editors, reporters, teachers, professors etc... will loose their job and have to find another profession. Perhaps they can get work in a facility that manufactures industrial breads. One doesn't need a baker's certificate for that these days. Anybody can place a list of ingredients in a container and put it on the conveyor belt. The automated system does the rest. But that too will soon become obsolete as there are already AI robots that can do this job much better.
As Stephen Hawkins predicted back in 2014, AI means the end of humanity. He was laughed away at the time but it won't be long before the laughter will fade away.
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