OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research lab based in San Francisco, California. It consists of two arms: OpenAI LP, a for-profit corporation, and OpenAI Inc., a non-profit that focuses on research in artificial intelligence. Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, founded OpenAI with Sam Altman in late 2015. Musk stepped down as CEO in February 2018, but continues to donate to the company. Microsoft is the biggest investor in OpenAI LP, having invested $1 billion into the nonprofit.
The founders of OpenAI wanted to raise billions of dollars to support research on artificial intelligence. But while many companies are investing in the company, their investment might lead to the company abandoning its mission. So the board decided to seek out larger corporations to fund research and development. Eventually, the company went public and announced that it would create a separate for-profit company called OpenAI LP to raise investment capital. Microsoft invested in OpenAI LP, and Altman was able to secure a large sum of money for the company from the tech giant.
While the team at OpenAI is small and has a flat hierarchy, the company is still highly dependent on communication. Its policy team is the backbone of the company. Although most employees work at the same location, a few employees are split between two offices. In addition to working from one office, Jack Clark, the policy team director, splits his time between Washington, DC and San Francisco. Jack Clark said he doesn’t mind splitting his time between the two offices, as long as he can share lunches with colleagues and work from the same space.
Both OpenAI and Tesla have been extremely successful. Musk has a net worth of over $190 billion, but has publicly criticized the decision to take the company public. He has struggled with financial analysts on earnings calls and has fought with short sellers, which could have badly damaged the firm. Musk, meanwhile, has built Tesla from the ground up, creating a $400 billion market-dominating force. And if OpenAI succeeds in making the best chess player and data scientist, he will be the most valuable investor of all time.
Although OpenAI employees may make more money than their peers at Google and Amazon, they are not as well compensated. Google and Amazon may offer stock options, but OpenAI isn’t allowed to do so. For example, DeepMind, which Google acquired for $600 million, paid its 500 employees $138 million in 2016, which is roughly $276,000 per employee. That’s a lot of money, and the rest would have gone to humankind.
The OpenAI lab recently announced the development of a convincing article model. This AI would produce convincing articles and essays. The model, dubbed GPT-2, would take four months to train. The team spent millions renting tens of thousands of computer chips and cloud computing services, including Amazon’s. In the future, Altman and colleagues hope to re-create human intelligence in a similar fashion. But first, they must find a way to create a computer model with the right software and hardware.
Microsoft is investing $1 billion in OpenAI, a startup dedicated to the creation of artificial general intelligence. The startup was founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, two Silicon Valley luminaries who believe AI could threaten the future of humanity. If successful, it could help make our society better and more humane. The company has yet to disclose what it hopes to do with this technology. However, Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI will allow it to commercialize some of its technology.
AI has the potential to make work easier, and could even lower the cost of goods. Labor is the main factor driving cost in many parts of the supply chain. Robots could build houses on land that has already been owned, refine natural resources on site, and produce solar power. They would also cost less to rent than humans. AI could also diagnose health problems better than humans and students better than a human. That means that AI will make our jobs easier, leaving us with more time for family and other activities.