OpenAI is led by Sam Altman, who became well known in Silicon Valley as the head of startup builder Y Combinator. Mr. Altman, 37, and his co-founders created OpenAI in 2015 as a non-profit organization. But he soon remade the company as a for-profit venture that could more aggressively pursue financing.
A year later, Microsoft invested $1 billion in the company and committed to building the supercomputer technologies that OpenAI’s huge models would demand as it became its “preferred partner for marketingtheir technologies. Open AI later officially licensed its technologies to Microsoft, allowing the company to add them directly to Microsoft products and services.
Backed by Microsoft, OpenAI went on to develop a landmark technology called GPT-3. Known as a “big language model,” it could generate text of its own, including tweets, blog posts, news articles, and even computer code.
Clumsy to use, it was primarily a tool for businesses and engineers. But a year later, OpenAI began work on DALL-E, which allowed anyone to generate realistic images simply by describing what they wanted to see. Microsoft incorporated GPT-3, DALL-E, and similar technologies into its own products.
GitHub, a popular online service for developers owned by Microsoft, began offering a developer tool called Copilot. As programmers created smartphone apps and other software, Copilot suggested the next line of code as they typed, in the same way that autocomplete tools suggest the next word as you type text or email.
For many, it was an “amazing moment” that showed what’s possible, Microsoft’s Boyd said.
Then late last year OpenAI introduced ChatGPT. More than a million people tried the chatbot during its first days online. He answered trivia questions, explained ideas, and generated everything from school documents to pop song lyrics.
