🔆 Lumiera Brief: The Essentials on OpenAI

🗞️ Issue 38 // ⏱️ Read Time: 7 min

Hello 👋

Last week, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and one of the main organizations setting the tone for AI development solutions, caused quite a stir: Rumors of the largest funding round in history, several executives jumping ship and large organisational changes.

Team Lumiera realized that while our feeds are filled with the latest news, it’s not easy to get a good overview of the main events and the company as a whole. As context is key, Lumiera has compiled a summary of the key moments throughout OpenAI's history. Use it as a perspective to analyze the most recent events, or just tuck it away in your pocket-of-random-facts-that-might-be-good-to-know-one-day.

Open AI: The Basics

Founded in 2015 by: Sam Altman (current CEO), Trevor Blackwell, Greg Brockman (current president), Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Jessica Livingston, Elon Musk (former co-chair, left in 2018), John Schulman, Ilya Sutskever (current chief scientist), Pamela Vagata, Wojciech Zaremba (current lead of language and code generation teams)

Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States.

Key Products: OpenAI Five, GPT-12344o, DALL·E, OpenAI Codex, SearchGPT, Sora, o1

The Timeline

The early days

→ 2015 

OpenAI was founded by a group of entrepreneurs, researchers, and technologists. The founders emphasized their commitment to open collaboration and making their work accessible to the public. Initially established as a non-profit, the goal was advancing artificial intelligence in a way that benefits humanity.

1. Non-profit structure: The organization was initially established as a non-profit entity.

2. Open collaboration: OpenAI aimed to "freely collaborate" with other institutions and researchers by making its patents and research open to the public.

3. Advancing AI for humanity: The original mission focused on developing artificial intelligence in a way that would benefit humanity as a whole, without the need to generate financial returns.

4. $1 billion pledge: The founders collectively pledged $1 billion to pursue these goals.

→ 2016 - 2017 

• The infrastructure team, led by founder Vicki Cheung, laid the groundwork for the technical advancements we would see later. 

• OpenAI released two significant products: 🏋️ OpenAI Gym, a platform for reinforcement learning algorithms, and 🌐 Universe, a platform to measure and train AI’s general intelligence. 

Redirection/Focus shifts 

→ 2018 

• More intense focus on AI research and development, introducing Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPTs).

• Elon Musk resigns due to potential conflicts of interest with Tesla's AI development. 

• Mira Murati joins OpenAI and later becomes the Chief Technology Officer.  

→ 2019 

• 💰️ Transition from a non-profit to a "capped-profit" model. This allowed the company to attract more investment while still adhering to its mission.

• The beginning of a key strategic partnership: Microsoft invests $1 billion in OpenAI.

→ 2020 

• Product milestone alert: GPT-3, a large language model that garnered widespread attention for its text generation capabilities, is released. Mira Murati was instrumental in the development of this model. 

• OpenAI announces plans to develop a commercial product centred around an API connected to GPT-3.

→ 2021 

🖼️ The introduction of DALL-E, an AI model capable of generating digital images from text descriptions. 

Hi world, meet ChatGPT

→ 2022  

📣 ChatGPT is launched in November. It quickly becomes the fastest-growing consumer application in history.

→ 2023 

• GPT-4, a more advanced language model, is released in March. The company continues to refine its products and expand its offerings throughout the year.

• Turbulent times: In November CEO Sam Altman is briefly ousted by the board, leading to a period of intense uncertainty. Mira Murati briefly serves as interim CEO in the meantime. 

• After 4 days, Altman is reinstated, following strong support from employees and investors. 

Where we are today

→ 2024

• In January, OpenAI becomes a part of the US national security complex. The company changed its terms of service to remove the prohibition on using its products for the purposes of “military and warfare”. That same month, OpenAI announced they are working with the Pentagon on open-source security software. 

• Departure of co-founder Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, who headed the company's ‘Superalignment Team’ focused on long-term AI safety. They are claiming that “safety has taken a backseat to shiny products”.

• In October 2024, the company raised $6.6 billion, the largest venture capital round of all time, per Axios' Dan Primack, in new funding after a complex fundraising process.

• This fundraising round involves several big changes: OpenAI is turning into a for-profit benefit corp, and some of the key people, such as Mira Murati, the CTO whose work was instrumental in the development of GPT-3 and DALL-E, is leaving the company to do her own exploration. VP of Research Barret Zoph and Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew. 

Did you make it all the way down here? Well done, you are now well equipped to understand one of the most powerful companies in the world. This is where OpenAI is today.📍We are observing the changes with excitement and cannot wait to update this timeline in a year. We don’t know exactly what to expect, but we are sure that we are in for a ride.

We are considering doing more of these overviews, of other AI organisations that matters. Do you consider this concept valuable? Scroll down to the end of this newsletter to let us know what you think.

Until next time.
On behalf of Team Lumiera

Emma - Business Strategist
Allegra - Data Specialist

Lumiera has gathered the brightest people from the technology and policy sectors to give you top-quality advice so you can navigate the new AI Era.