[Post 685] How ChatGPT Made OpenAI One Of The Most Valuable AI Startups

Summary

The company behind the popular artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015 by a number of researchers, academics and entrepreneurs including Sam Altman, Greg Brochman and Elon Musk. Musk left OpenAI in 2018 and now has his own artificial intelligence company called xAI.

In its early years, OpenAI flew somewhat under the radar, at least from the point of view of the general public. The company released its first project in 2016, a toolkit called “OpenAI Gym” used for developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms. That same year, OpenAI also released Universe, a tool to train intelligent agents on websites and gaming platforms. But the release of ChatGPT in 2022 is what propelled the company to stardom. Today, OpenAI is valued at over $80 billion and counts Microsoft, which has invested around $13 billion into OpenAI since 2019, as a major supporter and partner. But OpenAI’s wild success has also raised concerns from regulators and experts who question the outsized power that artificial intelligence companies and Big Tech could have on our society as well as the toll that the technology could take on our power grid.