OpenAI is a San Francisco based company created in 2015 to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. OpenAI’s work is driven by our charter, in which we commit to working toward the broad distribution of the benefits of AGI, to maximizing the long term safety of AI systems, to cooperating with other research and policy institutions, and to serving as a technical leader in AI to accomplish these objectives. OpenAI has an unusual structure that ensures that it remains focused on this long-term mission. We have a few key economic and governance provisions:

This structure enables us to prioritize safe and beneficial AI development while helping us secure the necessary capital to develop increasingly powerful AI models. For example, in January, Microsoft announced a multiyear, multibillion dollar investment in OpenAI, following previous investments in 2019 and 2021. 1 This investment provides necessary capital and advanced supercomputing infrastructure for OpenAI to develop, test, and improve our technology. Microsoft is an important investor in OpenAI, and we value their unique alignment with our values and long-term vision, including their shared commitment to building AI systems and products that are trustworthy and safe. At the same time, OpenAI remains an entirely independent company governed by the OpenAI Nonprofit. Microsoft has no board seat and does not control OpenAI. Furthermore, AGI technologies are explicitly reserved for the Nonprofit to govern.

OpenAI is a leading developer of large language models (LLMs) and other AI tools. Fundamentally, the current generation of AI models are large-scale statistical prediction machines – when a model is given a person’s request, it tries to predict a likely response. These models operate similarly to auto-complete functions on modern smartphones, email, or word processing software, but on a much larger and more complex scale.2 The model learns from reading or seeing data about the world, which improves its predictive abilities until it can perform tasks such as summarizing text, writing poetry, and crafting computer code. Using variants of this technology, AI tools are also capable of learning statistical relationships between images and text descriptions and then generating new images based on natural language inputs. Our models are trained on a broad range of data that includes publicly available content, licensed content, and content generated by human reviewers.3 Creating these models requires not just advanced algorithmic design and significant amounts of training data, but also substantial computing infrastructure to train models and then operate them for millions of users. Our major recent releases include tools that can generate images and text. In early 2022, we launched a research preview of DALL·E 2, an AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.4 Millions of users are now creating and improving images using DALL·E and sharing their creations with the world. Since the initial preview, we have expanded DALL·E’s capabilities, including launching a DALL·E Application Programming Interface (API) to help developers integrate DALL·E into apps and products5 On the text side, we have trained and publicly released a number of LLMs, beginning with the GPT‑2 family of models in 20196 and the GPT‑3 family of models in 2020.7 In November 2022, we released ChatGPT.8 These models can be used to organize, summarize, or generate new text. They “understand” user queries and instructions, then generate plausible responses based on those queries. The models generate responses by predicting the next likely word in response to the user’s request, and then continuing to predict each subsequent word after that. The models are available for free in most of the world; we also have launched a pilot subscription service, ChatGPT Plus, that provides additional benefits to users,9 and we make the models available as an API for developers to build applications and services. In March of this year, we released GPT‑4, our most advanced system, which is capable of producing more useful, more creative, more collaborative, and more accurate outputs than previous OpenAI products.10 GPT‑4 is available on ChatGPT Plus and (as with other GPT models) as an API for developers to build applications and services.

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that AI systems are built, deployed, and used safely and beneficially. We see firsthand both the potential and the actual positive impact that these systems have in improving people’s lives. We hear from users all over the world about how much they love our tools and how AI helps them in many ways, including helping them write complex computer code more quickly, enhancing their productivity and creativity, augmenting their existing strengths, helping them learn new skills, and expanding their businesses.11 Here are just some of the ways that customers are using our products: