OpenAI is led by Sam Altman, who rose to prominence in Silicon Valley as head of start-up builder Y Combinator. Mr. Altman, 37, and his co-founders founded OpenAI in 2015 as a non-profit organization. But he soon turned the company into a for-profit company that could pursue funding more aggressively.
A year later, Microsoft invested $1 billion in the company and committed to building the supercomputing technologies that would require OpenAI’s massive models as it became its “preferred partner for marketing” its technologies. OpenAI later Officially approved Share its technologies with Microsoft so that the company can add them directly to Microsoft products and services.
With support from Microsoft, OpenAI continued to build a milestone technology called GPT-3. Known as the “big language model,” it could generate text itself, including tweets, blog posts, news articles, and even computer code.
Clumsy to use, it was primarily a business and engineering tool. But a year later, work on OpenAI began DALL-E, which allowed anyone to create realistic images simply by describing what they wanted to see. Microsoft has incorporated GPT-3, DALL-E and similar technologies into its own products.
GitHub, a popular online service for programmers owned by Microsoft, began offering a programming tool called Copilot. As programmers developed smartphone apps and other software, Copilot suggested the next line of code as they type, similar to how autocomplete tools suggest the next word while typing texts or emails.
For many, it was a “breathtaking moment” that showed what’s possible, said Microsoft’s Mr. Boyd.
Then, late last year, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT. More than a million people tested the chatbot online in the first few days. It answered trivia questions, explained ideas, and generated everything from schoolwork to pop song lyrics.
