How Microsoft Took Control of OpenAI

in 2015 a non-profit company called open AI who was founded by world-class research engineers and scientists and funded by a group of the biggest names in Silicon Valley who collectively donated one billion dollars to a cause they are the AI research and deployment company behind a couple products you've probably heard of like Dolly 2 and chat GPT when founded they had one goal in mind to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit Humanity as a whole unconstrained by a need to generate Financial return but just last month on January 23 2023 openai accepted a 10 billion dollar investment from Microsoft on top of Microsoft's previous investment of one billion dollars in 2019 making Microsoft a reported 49 stakeholder receiving 75 percent of open ai's profits until it secures its investment return at face value it looks like any other investment into a budget thriving company but is it because just after Microsoft's initial investment in 2019 openai legally restructured from a non-profit company to a capped for-profit company with ongoing collaborations exclusively with Microsoft so how did we get here why did open ai go from nonprofit for Humanity to a for-profit that's heavily entertained with Microsoft and what has openai accomplished in the past six seven years well in this video that's exactly what I'm going to talk about and a whole lot more from the founders to the technological research and achievements the products and funding and how their mission may have shifted over time this is the untold story of open AI so it all started when open AI was founded back in 2015 when a group of passionate entrepreneurs scientists and researchers gathered together for one reason artificial intelligence with the belief that AI should be an extension of individual human wills and in the spirit of Liberty as broadly and evenly distributed as possible and just like that open AI was born just to give you some context the world was a different place back then many of us were anticipating the release of the iPhone 6s or on our way to watch the Furious 7 movie just to leave crying as Paul Walker drives off into the sunset to the tune of see you again a time when robot and AI Panic was rampant with most people thinking of AI as a technological threat that'll cause mass unemployment or as our biggest existential threat as Elon Musk put it or the few that still just picture Arnold Schwarzenegger as Terminator but the concept of open AI was to break down the stigma of AI to create something new and Innovative something that could help Humanity not destroy it that's why some of the best and brightest Minds in the industry came together to pledge that one billion dollars into this startup not as an investment mind you but as a donation all to build this non-profit artificial intelligence research company with a goal to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit Humanity as a whole unconstrained by a need to generate Financial return hmm interesting and that's what they began to do in April of 2016 just five months after openai was introduced they released their first product open AI gym now it's not your typical gym but a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms that consist of a growing Suite of environments from simulator robots to Atari games and a site for comparing and reproducing results if you aren't familiar with reinforcement learning well it's a subfield of machine learning concerned with decision making and motor control basically it's just a way for computers to learn how to do things by themselves via trial and error an openai gym gave us an environment to do just that shortly after Jim's release openai released a blog post giving us a bit more insight into their technical goals that is measure progress build a household robot build an agent with useful natural language understanding and solve a wide variety of games using a single agent and to No Surprise all of this will come to fruition in the near future by building upon the data gathered from Jim openai released Universe in December of 2016. just eight months after the release of jib universe is a software platform for measuring and training in ai's general intelligence across the world's supply of games websites and other applications it's like a more advanced version of gem where any program can be turned into a gym environment with a wider variety of tasks and more involvement in giving reinforcement learning networks and algorithms the ability to interact with the real world playing games using a virtual keyboard and mouse to interact with buttons and Sliders and web pages and much more it's exactly what they laid out in goal 4 of their technical goals we just talked about but this was only possible with support from many companies like EA valve Nvidia and Microsoft Studios openai needed permission on games and other tasks for Universe to use this was their first big foray into working with other companies aside from a bit of previous support from Nvidia Nirvana and AWS Universe really proved to be an incredible with its most impressive feat open ai5 an AI specialized in Dota 2 a game where most Specialists agreed is harder than chess and go initially open ai's bot could beat the world's top professionals at 1v1 matches in Dota 2 but Dota 2 is a 5v5 game so that was the ultimate goal hence the name open AI five so they worked on it for years defeating Bots then real players in restricted game modes a lot of back and forth play that is until April 13 2019 when open ai5 beat the Dota 2 world champions in back to back games becoming the first AI to beat the world champions in a knee sports game but what's more impressive is that the bot learned the game from scratch by self play without using imitation learning or tree search truly an amazing accomplishment in artificial intelligence done by openai and Bill Gates thought so too as he tweeted out how it was a huge milestone in advancing artificial intelligence because the victory required teamwork and collaboration he said this the first time openai 5 defeated humans in a restricted game about a year prior and this tweet marks Bill Gates first acknowledgment of the company only after the leaving of Elon musk's earlier that year in February 2018. coincidence you tell me considering Elon Musk and Bill Gates have never been on the best of terms maybe not speaking of which Elon Musk the co-founder of openai decided to leave the board due to a potential future conflict with Tesla's AI development since Tesla and openai both do research and development of AI tools it's understandable that Elon Musk decided to leave which I can appreciate since many other CEOs and the like would leverage that relationship in one company to benefit the other where have we seen this before but elon's departure did not slow things down the summer after he left open AI came out with another Innovation learning dexterity a human-like robot hand to manipulate physical objects with unprecedented dexterity called dactyl dactyl learns from scratch using the same general purpose reinforcement learning algorithm and code is open AI 5 proving that it's possible to train agents in simulation and have them solve real world tasks without physically accurate modeling of the world something that should not go unnoticed another step in achieving their goals and then comes the aforementioned one billion dollar investment from Microsoft quickly followed by open AI going from non-profit to for-profit or if we want to hit this with a well actually it actually created it open ailp a new cat profit company they've defined as a hybrid of a for-profit and non-profit quote to increase their ability to raise Capital while still serving our mission they exclaimed our day-to-day work is not changing today we believe we can build the most value by focusing exclusively on developing new AI Technologies not commercial products the decision to take on this investment from Microsoft and turn into a for-profit company came as a bit of a shock to many people understandably so remember a part of open ai's initial goal stated unconstrained by a need to generate Financial return and taking on Capital Investments like this well let's just say I bet Microsoft is looking for just that a financial return one way or another which is exactly why openai switched to for-profit they said they created open ailp because it allows them to rapidly increase Investments and compute and talent while including checks and balances to actualize their mission this decision shocked me as well but it's one I can also understand it allows them to raise more money to achieve their goals in AI research and Innovation because to put it bluntly this shit's expensive but this served as a turning point for open AI a once open source non-profit for Humanity with no need to generate Financial return now a for-profit company backed by Microsoft soon to be no longer open source but we'll get to that openai continued their work from before Microsoft's investment releasing many products and research discoveries in the same year Muse net a deep neural network that can generate four minute musical compositions with 10 different instruments combine styles from country to Mozart to The Beatles as well as solving Rubik's Cube with a robot hand yeah you remember dactyl it's progressing and finally gpt2 the precursor to gpt3 which is what chat gbt is built on I'm sure you've heard of that but as open ai's partnership with Microsoft progressed we we saw a shift not necessarily with the technological advancements but with how closely intertwined much of open ai's products became with Microsoft it's actually astounding for example when GPT was released the source code and model weights were publicly available for all to see and use when gpt2 was released the source code and model weights were not that is until later on when deemed safe but when openai released GPT 3 in 2020 an announcement came along with it of Microsoft's exclusive license to it that is only Microsoft has access to gpt3's underlying model no open source code or model weights we can only use gpt3 via an API provided exclusively through apis offered by openai and Microsoft this marks open ai's first commercial product the API even though just a year prior when they created open ailp they said their day-to-day work is not changing we believe we can build the most value by focusing exclusively on developing new technologies not commercial products but the API is a commercial product so they decided to release a commercial product all while discontinuing the open sourcing and giving Microsoft exclusive rights to the gpt3 code but why well they answered this they State we see developing commercial products as one of the ways to make sure we have enough funding to succeed which helps us pay for ongoing AI research safety and policy efforts but they already knew they had to do all that when they went for profit but are now going back on what they said that's the reoccurring theme that I keep seeing they say or do one thing then do the opposite once non-profit now for profit once open source now closed Source once denying commercial products now releasing commercial products all of which occurred after Microsoft's initial investment in 2019 still believe in coincidences open ad has an answer for us though and their FAQ for the API they answered some of these points we brought up why did openai decide to release a commercial product so they have enough funding to succeed in what they care about most ensuring artificial and general intelligence benefits everyone and why did open AI choose to release an API instead of open sourcing the models this is for gpt3 commercializing safety policy efforts more accessibility to smaller businesses and organizations due to the large complex models and to prevent misuse of the technology and look I have no problem with the company turning a profit but the blatant hypocrisy and switching of open AI is what gets at least they admit it as their main reason in closed sourcing gpt3 that it's to make money I mean I guess that's respectable but what are your thoughts on it comment below right now and let's see if it changes by the end of the video because we're not done and neither is open AI they continue to make progress in the field of artificial intelligence in 2021 they announced clip a neural network which efficiently learns visual concepts from natural language supervision Dali which you may have heard of a neural network that creates images from text captions for a wide range of Concepts expressible in natural language they also discovered neurons in clip that respond to the same concept whether presented literally symbolically or conceptually and they released open AI codecs their second commercial product and a descendant of gpt3 an AI system that translates natural language to code also known as the AI model that Powers GitHub co-pilot which they built and launched in partnership with GitHub a month prior now why do I emphasize this well if you don't know Microsoft owns GitHub they acquired them back in 2018 and this gave GitHub a massive head start to their competitors who'd want to use codex for their own AI code tools it's beginning to seem like open AI is prioritizing Microsoft's goals over their own but this also sparked another controversy which I've spoken about in the past that is codex trading data contains billions of lines of source code from publicly available sources including code and public GitHub repositories remember codex is a commercial product GitHub copilot is a commercial product is this legal what about using it because the GitHub CEO himself Nat freidman has concerns about the legal implications of using copilot and as epic games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney pointed out this system isn't learning high-level ideas and algorithms from repositories and then independently authoring a new implementation it's just concatenating character sequences from other people's work going deeper even if co-pilot didn't copy the code verbatim which has proven to be true in in the case in this instance an ethical question arises is it okay for companies like GitHub or openai to train these systems on open source code generated by thousands of developers to then sell the use of these systems to those same developers well I'll let you be the judge open AI then goes on to announce two of the most high products of 2022. Dolly 2 and chat GPT have you ever seen a polar bear playing bass or robot painted like a Picasso didn't think so Dolly 2 is a new AI system from openai that can take Simple Text descriptions like a koala dunking a basketball and turn them into photorealistic images that have never existed before and the technology behind it is incredibly interesting it uses a process called diffusion which starts with a pattern of random dots and gradually Alters that pattern towards an image when it recognizes specific aspects of that image a much needed upgrade to the first version of Dolly released a year prior 2021 open ai's hope is that Dolly too will Empower people to express themselves creatively Dolly too also helps us understand how advanced AI systems see and understand our world which is critical to their mission of creating AI that benefits humanity and as much as I loved Ali too mid journey is quite a bit better unfortunately another controversy Rose potential copyright infringement due to the data Dolly 2 which trained on but all that legal stuff is boring and can be talked about another time you just let me know when the second chat GPT my all-time favorite open AI release without a doubt is indicated by the fact that I created an entire video and why everyone's obsessed with it including myself I go into full detail in that video but to briefly mention it here Chad GPT is a model which interacts in a conversational way and is fine-tuned from a model in the GPT 3.5 series but it's a chatbot on steroids if you will after its public Beta release on November 30th 2022 it crossed 1 million users in the first five days and it's kind of disrupting every industry with schools blocking access stack Overflow Banning users from submitting generated answers and the fact that it can create malware from scratch it can write for you it can code for you and it's really amazing what openai has accomplished in the field of artificial intelligence there's no denying their achievements it's it's just that would it have been possible to be the company they had originally set up to be without these Investments on one hand I understand what capital can do to remove roadblocks to allow for Innovation but on the other hand I I wonder if openai has abandoned their original Mission of being for Humanity I I think the developers still have that goal in mind but the company they've gone from open and free to closed and paid from focusing exclusively on developing new AI Technologies to seemingly focusing on Commercial products so taking what I laid out here and comparing the actions open AI took prior to the 2019 Microsoft investment to the actions taken after what do you think personally I like the progress openai is making and if they would have gone belly up if they stuck to their original Mission then I'm glad they changed it this version of openai is better than no version at all however I think they should have had a plan for commercialization from the get-go instead of being a non-profit that that's what I would have done instead of relying on outside funding with the Innovations they're making they could have funded themselves via the gpt3 API Dolly to chat GPT codex and any other way they could have figured out how to monetize to fund their ongoing research it and let's be honest even if it was open source at this point in time I I bet all of us would still pay for the API because it's easier but again I haven't seen their books the outside Investments allowed them to hire more talent and scale their compute would they have been able to make the same progress without it I don't know and it's easy for me to say all this retrospectively oh just make money like this and you should have structured it like that but I'm not into the trenches I do still think my criticism of their flip-flopping is fair though because they established themselves as a certain type of company with certain goals and standards in mind that were thrown out the window when Microsoft waved a billion dollars in their face and and being the brightest Minds in this industry they knew what it took to build a company like this so I don't believe these costs were unforeseen so now that Microsoft just invested an extra 10 billion dollars I'm interested to see what the future holds for openai what do you think should open AI have accepted this huge investment from Microsoft if Elon Musk was still in the picture how would he have shaped open ai's path let me know your thoughts below all we can do at this point is hope for the best until next time

Channel: ForrestKnight

Views: 26,199

Keywords: ai, ai podcast, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence podcast, chat gpt, chatgpt, computer science, copilot, deep learning, github copilot, lex ai, lex fridman, lex mit, lex podcast, machine learning, microsoft, microsoft copilot, microsoft copilot 365, mit ai, open ai, open ai chat gpt, openai, sam altman, software development, stock market, the story of openai

Id: o07kRSvz7yM

Length: 19min 36sec (1176 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 04 2023