Introducing OpenAI: Non-Profit AI Research Initiative (December 2015)

Overview

OpenAI was introduced as a non-profit artificial intelligence research company whose goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.

Mission and Principles

OpenAI believes AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible. The outcome of this venture is uncertain and the work is difficult, but the goal and structure are considered right.

Background on AI Trends

Artificial intelligence has historically been a surprising field; early hopes that solving specific tasks like chess would yield general intelligence proved overly optimistic. More recently, deep learning—a technique explored for decades—has begun achieving state-of-the-art results across many domains, enabling architectures that adapt to data rather than requiring hand‑coded algorithms for each problem. This has produced strong performance in pattern recognition tasks such as object recognition, machine translation, and speech recognition, and has begun to suggest possibilities for computers to exhibit creativity, dreaming, and world experience.

Organizational Structure and Leadership

Because AI’s history makes predicting human‑level AI difficult, OpenAI aims to become a leading research institution that prioritizes a good outcome for all over self‑interest. As a non‑profit, its aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. Researchers are strongly encouraged to publish their work—whether as papers, blog posts, or code—and any patents (if any) will be shared with the world. OpenAI intends to collaborate freely with other institutions and work with companies to research and deploy new technologies.

The organization’s research director is Ilya Sutskever, a world expert in machine learning. Its CTO is Greg Brockman, formerly CTO of Stripe. Founding members include Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba. Advisors comprise Pieter Abbeel, Yoshua Bengio, Alan Kay, Sergey Levine, and Vishal Sikka. The co‑chairs are Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

Funding and Support

Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research are donating to support OpenAI. In total, these funders have committed $1 billion, although OpenAI expects to spend only a tiny fraction of this amount in the next few years.

Commitment to Openness and Collaboration

OpenAI will freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expects to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies. The organization encourages publication of research and sharing of any patents, aiming to spread the benefits of AI widely.