OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory consisting of the non-profit OpenAI Incorporated and its for-profit subsidiary corporation OpenAI Limited Partnership. OpenAI conducts AI research with the declared intention of promoting and developing friendly AI.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Jessica Livingston, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk serving as the initial board members.[4][5][6] Microsoft provided OpenAI LP with a $1 billion investment in 2019 and a $10 billion investment in 2023.[7][8]

The technological singularity—or simply the singularity[1]—is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization.[2][3] According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, I. J. Good's intelligence explosion model, an upgradable intelligent agent will eventually enter a "runaway reaction" of self-improvement cycles, each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an "explosion" in intelligence and resulting in a powerful superintelligence that qualitatively far surpasses all human intelligence.[4]

The first person to use the concept of a "singularity" in the technological context was the 20th-century Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann.[5] Stanislaw Ulam reports in 1958 an earlier discussion with von Neumann "centered on the accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue".[6] Subsequent authors have echoed this viewpoint.[3][7]

The concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by Vernor Vinge first in 1983 in an article that claimed that once humans create intelligences greater than their own, there will be a technological and social transition similar in some sense to "the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole",[8] and later in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity,[4][7] in which he wrote that it would signal the end of the human era, as the new superintelligence would continue to upgrade itself and would advance technologically at an incomprehensible rate. He wrote that he would be surprised if it occurred before 2005 or after 2030.[4] Another significant contributor to wider circulation of the notion was Ray Kurzweil's 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, predicting singularity by 2045.[7]

Some scientists, including Stephen Hawking, have expressed concern that artificial superintelligence (ASI) could result in human extinction.[9][10] The consequences of the singularity and its potential benefit or harm to the human race have been intensely debated.

Prominent technologists and academics dispute the plausibility of a technological singularity and the associated artificial intelligence explosion, including Paul Allen,[11] Jeff Hawkins,[12] John Holland, Jaron Lanier, Steven Pinker,[12] Theodore Modis,[13] and Gordon Moore.[12] One claim made was that the artificial intelligence growth is likely to run into decreasing returns instead of accelerating ones, as was observed in previously developed human technologies.

n December 2015, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research announced[9] the formation of OpenAI and pledged over $1 billion to the venture. According an investigation led by TechCrunch, the non-profit's funding remains murky, with Musk its biggest funder while another donor, YC Research, did not contribute anything at all.[10] The organization stated it would "freely collaborate" with other institutions and researchers by making its patents and research open to the public.[11][12] OpenAI is headquartered at the Pioneer Building in Mission District, San Francisco.[13][14]

According to Wired, Brockman met with Yoshua Bengio, one of the "founding fathers" of the deep learning movement, and drew up a list of the "best researchers in the field".[15] Brockman was able to hire nine of them as the first employees in December 2015.[15] In 2016, OpenAI paid corporate-level (rather than nonprofit-level) salaries, but did not pay AI researchers salaries comparable to those of Facebook or Google.[15]

Microsoft's Peter Lee stated that the cost of a top AI researcher exceeds the cost of a top NFL quarterback prospect.[15] OpenAI's potential and mission drew these researchers to the firm; a Google employee said he was willing to leave Google for OpenAI "partly because of the very strong group of people and, to a very large extent, because of its mission."[15] Brockman stated that "the best thing that I could imagine doing was moving humanity closer to building real AI in a safe way."[15] OpenAI co-founder Wojciech Zaremba stated that he turned down "borderline crazy" offers of two to three times his market value to join OpenAI instead.[15]