OpenAI

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) research company that aims to carefully promote and develop friendly AI in such a way as to benefit, rather than harm, humanity as a whole. The organisation aims to "freely collaborate" with other institutions and researchers by making its patents and research open to the public. The company is supported by over $1 billion in commitments; however, only a tiny fraction of the $1 billion pledged is expected to be spent in the first few years.

In July 2019, Open AI received a US$1 Billion investment from Microsoft to pursue further development of Artificial Intelligence to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) - essentially bringing AI to the point that it can understand any intellectual task a human brain can. The investment will mean that Microsoft will be the exclusive provider of cloud computing services to OpenAI, and the two companies will begin work to together to develop new technologies. OpenAI will also license some of its tech to Microsoft to commercialise, although it is not clear when this will happen or what kind of technology will be released.

In November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a chatbot platform optimising language models for dialogue. ChatGPT interacts in a conversational way, enabling for ChatGPT to answer questions, follow up on those questions, challenge incorrect text, admit a mistake, and reject things it finds inappropriate.

ChatGPT has a sibling model, InstructGPT, which can follow an instruction and provide a response.

In January 2023 OpenAI and Microsoft announced an extended, multi-billion-dollar partnership. While the official investment amount has not been disclosed, the news follows rumours of a $10bn investment.

In March 2023, OpenAI launched new model GPT-4, which can understand both images and text.

May 2023 saw OpenAi raise $450m in a Series C funding round, although the company chose not to disclose how much the company is now worth.  The figure is believed to be over $4bn. Google, Salesforce, and Zoom, among others, participated in this financing round.  It also recently announced a partnership with Zoom to build AI products, which in turn followed a similar arrangement with Google.