OpenAI has opened up AI to the world but will it conquer the world?

We have been using GPT software since its launch in a range of learning tasks and in all three of these books, the idea of AI generating content among many other tasks is covered. It is not a matter of 'if' but when and how much the learning game will be transformed by AI.

AI is the new UI, as well as generating content, learner support, personalisation and assessment. It is leading to smarter platforms, smarter content and smarter forms of delivery.

OpenAI is worth around $30 billion. This doesn’t surprise me. It was set up as a philanthropic entity to create AI for the good of humankind. It has been true to that goal so far, creating some of the most astounding AI services we’ve ever seen. It worked because of its focus on hiring some of the best talent on the planet, funding it well and giving them clear goals.

 

It started with a $1 Billion investment in December 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, AWS, Infosys and YCResearch. It became a ‘capped-for=profit with a $1 Billion investment by Microsoft.

 

1. Microsoft has invested $1 billion but that deal is not exclusive, so OpenAI can do things for themselves and with others. This gives them the flexibility to do things either solo or in deals with others.

 

2. DALL-E became a global meme in image creation. It was the start of generative image AI that is going at an incredible speed. It is clear that this will have a major impact on image production, content production, even art. There is also Image GPT.

 

3. GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is much larger than ChatGPT, with 175 billion parameters compared to ChatGPT's 20 billion parameters. This makes GPT-3 more powerful and capable of handling more complex natural language processing tasks.

 

4. ChatGPT-3 though, is a dialogue based LLM that was released to huge acclaim. It is truly disruptive as a text generator in areas such as content creation and assessment. It is rumoured that ChatGPT-4 will be released in 2023.

 

5. Whisper is speech recognition software, trained on a huge and diverse set of audio data. It can generate speech as well as translate and identify languages. 

 

6. OpenAI Five is a set of five bots that play on five on five games in Dota 2, a computer game. They also have GYM Retroa platform for RL research on video games. 

 

7. MuseNet has been trained to predict subsequent musical notes in MIDI music files to generate songs with ten different instruments in fifteen different styles.

 

In just a few years they have managed to create some of the world’s most advanced AI software. There is no guarantee that the existing large tech companies will not be challenged by the new. In fact, it is almost certain. Being small and focussed, well funded, with clear goals, can lead to stunning breakthroughs. Deepmind was a previous example in AI, there will be others.