Introducing OpenAI

OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is 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. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible.The outcome of this venture is uncertain and the work is difficult, but we believe the goal and the structure are right. We hope this is what matters most to the best in the field.

Artificial intelligence has always been a surprising field. In the early days, people thought that solving certain tasks (such as chess) would lead us to discover human-level intelligence algorithms. However, the solution to each task turned out to be much less general than people were hoping (such as doing a search over a huge number of moves).

The past few years have held another flavor of surprise. An AI technique explored for decades, deep learning, started achieving state-of-the-art results in a wide variety of problem domains. In deep learning, rather than hand-code a new algorithm for each problem, you design architectures that can twist themselves into a wide range of algorithms based on the data you feed them. This approach has yielded outstanding results on pattern recognition problems, such as recognizing objects in images, machine translation, and speech recognition. But we've also started to see what it might be like for computers to be creative, to dream, and to experience the world...