OpenAI

3rd February 2023

Have you heard of OpenAI?

Well, you have now! Heralded as the next revolution after industrial and technological, its considered a disrupter, a game changer, next level.

So, what is it?

OpenAI Inc is an American research laboratory, headquartered in San Francisco which is developing cutting-edge General Artificial Intelligence (GAI) technology. The company was founded at the end of 2015 by a group of influential entrepreneurs and researchers, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Ilya Sutskever, who collectively pledged over $1 billion.

The stated goal is to benefit the whole of humanity in an open and collaborative way - an extraordinary claim but a very welcome positive ambition, in the face of global catastrophe at every turn!

And what can it do?

There are numerous products and applications, all of which have been developed (and will continuously develop) using reinforcement learning which, if I have understood this correctly, seems to mean self-learning, in a similar way to humans, using the vast amounts of global data that is available.

Examples include: physical robots that can perform complex and precise operations, whether on humans or inanimate objects, and which can learn to adapt to changing environmental situations, such as bracing against high winds. There are also robots that can use visual observation to learn, or to alter their behaviour. ChatGPT is an interesting internet application, whereby anyone can ask a question in natural language and get a natural answer (not a page of search results, as with a search engine) – a very serious problem in education, where students can now obtain an original answer to a set question, which is indistinguishable from human work, in seconds. Maybe even this article was written by a machine …

GAI technology is not a completely new concept, however, as in 2010 British artificial intelligence DeepMind was founded, also with the stated purpose of using AI to advance science and benefit humanity. It was sold to Google in 2014 as a way of accelerating its work and has developed AI that has learned to diagnose eye diseases as effectively as the world’s top doctors. Deepmind AI has also discovered how to save 30% of the energy used to keep data centres cool, and to predict the complex 3D shapes of proteins - which could one day transform how drugs are invented (and to improve Google products).

Basically, both DeepMind and OpenAI are about developing AI systems that, through self-learning, are capable of autonomous creativity and problem solving at a level far beyond the reach of the human brain. The only problem seems to be how to ensure that it is used for good and not evil ...