#2 What OpenAI did before ChatGPT

OpenAI’s humble beginnings trace back to 2015, almost 9 years ago. Yet till 2023, only professionals working in the tech industry had heard its name. The release of ChatGPT made OpenAI a household name, popular amongst college students of all disciplines and young corporate employees alike.

Here’s a brief timeline of OpenAI you can peer into:

2015 - The non-profit initially started as an AI research organization, with funding from the likes of Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Amazon Web Services, amongst others, with Musk being the largest donor.

2016 - OpenAI “Gym” was released (platform for reinforcement learning research) and so was “Universe” (measuring and training an AI’s general intelligence).

2017 - Most funds were focused towards cloud computing, and a bot was developed for playing “Dota 2”, which is a complex multi-player battle game.

2018 - The bot was now a team of five, termed as the “OpenAI Five”. A significant development in this year would be Musk’s resignation from the Board of Directors, citing “potential future conflict of interest”, due to Tesla’s developments for self-driving cars at the time.

2019 - A limited version of GPT-2 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) was released and OpenAI transformed itself from a “non-profit” to a “capped- profit” organization, which essentially means that investors get limited profit. The new model allowed OpenAI to raise funds from venture capital firms and offer employees ESOPs (Employee Stock Option Plans).

2020 - GPT-3 was released, which was more powerful than the previous version and hence reported better accuracy and results.

2021 - DALL-E, the text-to-image model was released, which generated images based on descriptions provided, termed more technically as “prompts”.

2022 - The famed ChatGPT- 4 was released, marking the start of OpenAI’s fame with the general world.

2023 - GPT- 4 was released and the whole Sam-Altman-ousted-from-OpenAI fiasco happened, which you probably have heard of. Still, ICYMI, Altman was ousted from the board and was offered a position at Microsoft, which he then left to return to his previous role at OpenAI.

2024 - Sora, a text-to-video model was released and is not available for the public yet. Recent news also indicate that Altman now wants to turn the organization to a regular, “for-profit” company. This remains to be confirmed.

So, these are OpenAI’s achievements till date, in less than 10 years from its start. It is riveting to wonder where the company could be in the next 10 years.

Are you interested to see where OpenAI will go from here? Will you track the developments further?

Let me know in the comments!

PS: If you like my content, feel free to share it!