Today, OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company was announced to the world. Its director, Ilya Sutskever, is a research scientist at Google. This comes a day after Facebook open-sourced its AI hardware.
Its reason for existing was explained in an introductory post:
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.
Former Stripe CTO Greg Brockman is taking the same position for OpenAI. There are quite a few other interesting names involved, including Y Combinator’s Sam Altman and Tesla/SpaceX’s Elon Musk acting as co-chairs:
The group’s other founding members are world-class research engineers and scientists: Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba. Pieter Abbeel, Yoshua Bengio, Alan Kay, Sergey Levine, and Vishal Sikka are advisors to the group. OpenAI’s co-chairs are Sam Altman and Elon Musk.
Announcing formation of @open_ai …https://t.co/Fcouhwh6MC
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2015
Disrupt 2026: The tech ecosystem, all in one room
Your next round. Your next hire. Your next breakout opportunity. Find it at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where 10,000+ founders, investors, and tech leaders gather for three days of 250+ tactical sessions, powerful introductions, and market-defining innovation. Register now to save up to $400.
Save up to $300 or 30% to TechCrunch Founder Summit
1,000+ founders and investors come together at TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 for a full day focused on growth, execution, and real-world scaling. Learn from founders and investors who have shaped the industry. Connect with peers navigating similar growth stages. Walk away with tactics you can apply immediately
Offer ends March 13.
Really excited to announce @open_ai. Please check it out: https://t.co/6mRsCgCJiX
— Sam Altman (@sama) December 11, 2015
The organization is being funded by Altman, Brockman, Musk, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services, Infosys and YC Research. Those funders have contributed $1 billion thus far. Musk has been donating money to make sure that AI doesn’t go the way of Skynet, so it’s nice to know that his involvement will have a safety lens on it.
