Ten years

OpenAI has achieved more than I dared to dream possible; we set out to do something crazy, unlikely, and unprecedented. From a deeply uncertain start and against all reasonable odds, with continued hard work it now looks like we have a shot to succeed at our mission.

We announced our effort to the world ten years ago today, though we didn’t officially get started⁠(opens in a new window) for another few weeks, in early January of 2016.

Ten years is a very long time in some sense, but in terms of how long it usually takes the arc of society to bend, it is not very long at all. Although daily life doesn’t feel all that different than it did a decade ago, the possibility space in front of us all today feels very different than what it felt like when we were 15 nerds sitting around trying to figure out how to make progress.

When I look back at the photos from the early days, I am first struck by how young everyone looks. But then I’m struck by how unreasonably optimistic everyone looks, and how happy. It was a crazy fun time: although we were extremely misunderstood, we had a deeply held conviction, a sense that it mattered so much it was worth working very hard even with a small chance of success, very talented people, and a sharp focus.

In 2017, we had several foundational results: our Dota 1v1 results, where we pushed reinforcement learning to new levels of scale. The unsupervised sentiment neuron, where we saw a language model undeniably learn semantics rather than just syntax. And we had our reinforcement learning from human preferences result, showing a rudimentary path to aligning an AI with human values. At this point, the innovation was far from done, but we knew we needed to scale up each of these results with massive computational power.

Ten years into OpenAI, we have an AI that can do better than most of our smartest people at our most difficult intellectual competitions.