OpenAI celebrates 10 years of existence — but how has it lived up to its promise of AGI which ‘benefits all of humanity’?

OpenAI quietly sprung onto the scene 10 years ago, but it would be waiting a while before its meteoric rise to prominence.

The pioneering AI company was founded as a non-profit organization in December 2015 by a consortium of tech industry figures, which included Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and Greg Brockman among others.

Initially co-chaired by Musk and Altman, the company’s stated aims were to drive the safe and responsible development of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

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“OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity,” the OpenAI charter reads.

“We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome.”

In the intervening years between its foundation and the iconic release of ChatGPT in 2022, the company quietly worked away in the background. Its first ‘official’ launch was a public beta for ‘OpenAI Gym’, a developer tool for comparing reinforcement learning algorithms.

While Microsoft is now among its biggest backers, one of its earliest was Nvidia.

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The chipmaker gifted its DGX-1 supercomputer to OpenAI in August 2016 to help it accelerate training for larger and more sophisticated AI models.

February 2019 was a landmark moment for the company. The launch of GPT-2 is when many in Silicon Valley, and the tech industry at large, began paying attention to the firm.

GPT-2’s ability to generate human-like text based on natural language inputs marked a step change for the firm, and firmly set it on an upward trajectory.

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ChatGPT launch

The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 absolutely rocked the global technology industry. AI was by no means a new-fangled technology, but the rise of ‘generative AI’ signified a landmark moment.

ChatGPT differed from traditional forms of AI, such as predictive AI, in that it could autonomously generate content based on natural language queries from users.

The early days of ChatGPT sparked a frenzy of activity in the technology sector and across society more broadly. Users from around the world flocked to the new tool to test it out and put it through its paces.

Indeed, ChatGPT remains the most popular chatbot on the market today despite the array of competitors it now faces.

On the enterprise front, the launch completely upended strategies at a host of major technology companies. Crucially, OpenAI was backed by Microsoft, which made clear its intention to support the company’s development and eventually integrate its AI models within core products.

Competitors such as Google, for example, were caught completely unaware, with CEO Sundar Pichai upending internal teams in December 2022 and reallocating staff and resources to focus on AI development in a bid to catch up.

Part of the woodwork

OpenAI has only been around for 10 years, and only really became a prominent company in the broader tech industry for just over three years at this point. Yet it very much feels like it’s part of the woodwork.

Its AI models underpin the core product ranges at one of the largest tech giants on the planet, and the company is deeply entwined with a host of other major players.

With the generative AI ‘boom’ showing no signs of slowing down, the company is likely to remain a key player in the space. Indeed, closer ties with Oracle in recent months and its slow drift away from Microsoft highlight a growing sense of independence at the company.