2022 will be remembered as the year in which Artificial Intelligenceapplied was made available to everyone. DALL-E 2 first, and ChatGPT later, were open to everyone with hardly any limitations —the first, with free use credits to create images, and the second, completely open— to amaze us with their capabilities. The AI had arrived in a tangible form and, far from science fiction stories, it served to generate images with an artistic approach and texts and reasoned answers in an amazing way. Behind both was OpenAI, and in front of it, our protagonist: Sam Altman, its CEO.
Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with, among others, Elon Musk. As an entity, OpenAI is a rarity in its own right. A non-profit AI research laboratory founded and financed by big names and companies that, in turn, is inside a company that does have a commercial vocation.
That profit motive, not written in its origins, was the great change that Altman introduced three years ago now and what has taken them to the next level.
It was in 2019 when Microsoft contributed 1,000 million investment, in something that at the time was seen as a purchase or at least a hidden game of influence. At that time, Microsoft and OpenAI announced that they had entered into an exclusive, multi-year partnership to build new AI supercomputing technology from Azure, Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem.
Today that alliance looks more naked than ever after the information that ChatGPT will be incorporated into Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, during the first half of this year. A movement that is a direct check to the hegemony of Google.
Altman, prior to the inception of OpenAI, held the position of President at Y Combinator for many years.one of the most important startup accelerators in the world.
Now Altman, 37, a native of Chicago who grew up in a Jewish family and studied computing at Starnford University, is the new Golden Boy technology, and surely much more will be said about it in the future. This is his story.
From the idea of OpenAI to making it grow
As we mentioned, OpenAI started as a non-profit organization in 2015 with grants from Altman, Elon Musk, or LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and other sponsors. The team, which works out of an office in San Francisco, wanted to create a research counterbalance to big tech companies like Google.
Instead of pursuing business profit, OpenAI pledged to advance technology “for the benefit of humanity.”. The group’s founding charter promised to drop the race to develop artificial general intelligence if a competitor got there first.
That approach changed. In 2019, OpenAI onboarded its first group of investors and capped returns at 100 times the cost of their contributions. After Microsoft’s investment, Altman pressured OpenAI to provide more income to attract financing and support the resources necessary to train its algorithms, which at the level of large computers and servers are not few. To get an idea, it is estimated that having ChatGPT open and free will cost them about 1,000 million dollars a year.
That deal also gave Microsoft a strategic foothold in the race to capitalize on advances in AI. Microsoft became the preferred partner for OpenAI to commercialize its technologies, as it will happen.
With the help of the funding, OpenAI accelerated the development and publication of its artificial intelligence models, an approach that industry observers have described as more aggressive than the tactics of larger and more scrutinized competitors such as Google.
Altman is turning OpenAI from a research institute to a for-profit company
To help improve employee compensation and attract more talent, Altman also held occasional public stock offerings to help employees sell their shares. He has said on several occasions that OpenAI has no plans to be acquired or go public.
OpenAI has capped profits for some venture capitalists to around 20 times their investments, with the potential to earn higher profits the longer they wait to sell their shares, the journal has reported. Wall Street Journal. Altman has said that this investment structure was necessary to ensure that the value of OpenAI accrues not only for investors and employees, but also for humanity in general.
In recent conversations with investors, Altman has claimed that the company will soon be able to generate up to $1 billion in annual revenue., thanks in part to charging consumers and businesses for their own products. It already charges for significant use of DALL-E and GPT, and will probably do so in the future for ChatGPT.
All this has meant that criticism has not been slow to emerge. Some members of the AI community accuse him of straying from OpenAI’s promise to make its research transparent and avoid enriching shareholders.
“They want to acquire more and more data, more and more resources, to build great models,” says Emad Mostaque, founder of Stability AI, a competing company that has placed fewer restrictions on its Stable Diffusion imaging program by making it open source. and free for developers.
So far, OpenAI has generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue, mostly from selling its programmable code to other developers, the same newspaper has learned.