Genesis of Genius: Tracing the History of OpenAI & ChatGPT

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0:44So let's dive into the podcast. I think the first thing that is important to know is that ChatGPT's, I guess, parent company, which is OpenAI, was originally founded back in December of 2015. So it was founded by a group of pretty high-profile tech leaders that you know quite a few of them probably, but there was Elon Musk, Sam Altman, the current CEO, Greg Brockman, Ily Suskiver, John Shulman, Wajsiej Zarimba, and I really apologize if I butchered some of those names. I'm gonna have to go look up a pronunciation guide on some of those. But in any case, their goal in creating this was to create a non-profit that would help advance AI in a way that benefited humanity as a whole rather than just the interest of individual corporations and this was kind of in response to google buying up some very prominent ai companies and people were kind of worried that google essentially would be able to control the future of ai so i believe they put in a couple hundred million dollars don't fact check me on that but they put in a lot of money elon musk contributed money to this as well and the idea was that they were really going to create this community this company that was able to help humanity.

1:59So in its early years, OpenAI really just focused on producing some of the groundbreaking research we have today on natural language processing. So reinforcement learning, robotics, and a couple other AI fields. It also released several open source software libraries like TensorFlow and Jim that helped other researchers and developers build and experiment with their own AI models. So obviously very useful and very helpful for the overall community. One of OpenAI's most significant contributions to the AI field was in the development of the GPT-generated pre-trained transformer series of language models.

2:35So this still, though, is all thanks to the fact that Google's engineers wrote a paper in 2017, the year before, and talked about transformer models and how that would work and why they'd be important. And so building on this, the first GPT model was released in 2018, and it was trained on a massive corpus of text data from the internet. So this really just enabled the model to generate coherent and contextually appropriate language, which was a very significant breakthrough in natural language processing. So the real game changer though came with the release of GPT-2. So in February of 2019, this was, GPT-2 was released.

3:15It was much larger than its predecessor and it could generate highly realistic text, including news article style stuff, stories, and even poetry. So OpenAid decided not to release the full model to the public due to concerns about its potential misuse, and instead it released a smaller version called GPT-2, which was, or I guess it was called GPT-217M, which was still highly impressive but it had fewer parameters and was less likely to be used for malicious purposes they said so around this time open ai also started to shift its focus from being a non-profit research institute to becoming a for-profit company now this is was very controversial for a lot of folks who write obviously elon musk and these other guys who originally seeded this thing with millions of dollars are now seeing this go from, I guess, poetic justice.

4:14This is literally, the irony is incredible, but going from this open AI company to all of a sudden being a for-profit. So the irony was not lost on many people, but the decision inevitably was motivated by what they said was their need to attract more funding and talent to keep up with the pace of AI development. So in 2019, OpenAI secured around$1 billion in investment from some high-profile investors, including Microsoft and Reid Hoffman. Since then, OpenAI has continued to release even more powerful language models, including GPT-3, which is essentially what's called the DaVinci model. It's pretty much before ChatGPT.

4:55ChatGPT is like 3.5. So right before ChatGPT, it was the most powerful model. It had 175 billion parameters, and it can pretty much generate really powerful human-like language. There's tools like Jasper and Copy.ai that are all just using this GPT-3 technology. And even to this day, it's the only one with an API. So companies aren't even integrating ChatGPT into their products yet. It's still all this DaVinci model, which is GPT-3. so it's been hailed as a massive breakthrough in ai obviously um it's has you know it's in a whole bunch of apps and chatbots and content generators and whatnot but it's not the only language model that openai released so openai also developed several other models that are tailored to specific tasks and domains so we know that there's dolly which can generate uh high quality images from text right so you can tell it to create an image of something that can do that and there is clip which can understand and classify images based on their content open eyes also released several commercial products based on its language models including GPT-3 powered chatbots content generating tools and even some AI powered writing assistants so call there's one called GPT-3 writers so these products are designed to help businesses and developers leverage the power of AI to automate some tasks, improve efficiency, and create new experiences for their users.

6:27Now, that being said, I feel like the direction of all of this is really going towards GPT-4, which is what's going to be integrated in the Bing search engine. We're going to see this in the next couple months, allegedly, and perhaps sooner. So it's going to be really interesting to see what happens there and to see how powerful all of this is. So OpenAI's success has also raised some concerns about the potential risks associated with AI. So it's definitely not without its own controversies, but it has created some incredible tools. And I would also say that in addition to some of its language models, it's also involved in some other areas in AI, which are including research, robotics, reinforcement learning, and computer vision.

7:10So it's also developed some pretty notable projects in these fields, such as robotics, its hand system, dactyl and the ai powered game playing agent open ai 5 in addition open ai work has received widespread recognition and um you know accolades or whatever you want to call them from the scientific community its researchers have published hundreds of papers in top tier conferences and journals and its language models have won several nlp benchmarks and competitions so open ai has been recognized as one of the most innovative companies in the world by various different organizations, including MIT Technology Review.

7:49So, you know, this is obviously an incredibly forward-thinking company, and it has some really incredible technology. So I think looking to the future, OpenAI is likely to continue to push kind of the boundaries of what's possible with AI, AI research, and kind of developing new applications that are just really disruptive to a lot of different industries, and its language models in particular. I think we're going to see those play an increasingly prominent role in creating more personalized and intelligent experiences for users so overall i think the content is going to just get a lot better these things are going to get a lot more trained and a lot more powerful and it's going to be an incredible time to watch and see what this is able to make