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🔆 Lumiera Brief: The Essentials on OpenAI
Team Lumiera's TL;DR on OpenAI's Journey, brand new AI architectures, and AI-powered brain pattern breakthroughs
Allegra Guinan & Emma G Moller
October 03, 2024
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🗞️ 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.
In this week's newsletter
What we’re talking about: A curated timeline of OpenAI's journey - from its idealistic beginnings to becoming a major force in AI development. We're highlighting the key milestones that shaped the company behind ChatGPT and DALL-E.
How it’s relevant: OpenAI has been setting the pace for AI innovation, and its products have quickly become household names. Understanding its history provides context for analyzing recent events and the company's impact on the AI industry.
Why it matters: OpenAI's journey from a non-profit to a "capped-profit" model, its partnerships, product launches, and recent leadership changes offer insights into the evolving dynamics of AI development and commercialization.
Big tech news of the week…
🆕 Liquid AI, an MIT spinoff, has unveiled a series of innovative AI models called Liquid Foundation Models (LFMs) that challenge traditional large language models with a fundamentally new architecture, promising improved efficiency and performance across various data types.
🌍 Alibaba Cloud has open-sourced more than 100 of its newly launched AI models, collectively known as Qwen 2.5. Their goal is to enhance the ability to leverage AI technologies and further stimulate the growth of the open-source community.
🧠 Maryam Shanechi, the founding director of the USC Center for Neurotechnology, and her team have developed a new AI algorithm that can separate brain patterns related to a particular behaviour. This work can improve brain-computer interfaces and discover new brain patterns.
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.