What Is OpenAI?

This section provides an overview of OpenAI and its most notable development—ChatGPT, highlighting its history, technology, and capabilities. The overall goal is to provide a deeper knowledge of how ChatGPT can be used in various industries and applications to improve communication and automate processes and, finally, how those applications can impact the world of technology and beyond.

History of OpenAI

OpenAI is a research organization founded in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman. As stated on the OpenAI web page, its mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. AGI is intended to have the ability to learn and perform a wide range of tasks without the need for task-specific programming.

Since 2015, OpenAI has focused its research on deep reinforcement learning (DRL), a subset of machine learning (ML) that combines reinforcement learning (RL) with deep neural networks. The first contribution in that field traces back to 2016 when the company released OpenAI Gym, a toolkit for researchers to develop and test RL algorithms.