Last spring, artificial intelligence research institute OpenAI said it had made software so good at generating text—including fake news articles—that it was too dangerous to release. That line in the sand was soon erased when two recent master’s grads recreated the software and OpenAI released the original, saying awareness of the risks had grown and it hadn’t seen evidence of misuse.
Now the lab is back with a more powerful text generator and a new pitch: Pay us to put it to work in your business. Thursday, OpenAI launched a cloud service that a handful of companies are already using to improve search or provide feedback on answers to math problems. It’s a test of a new way of programming AI and the lab’s unusual business model.
OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015 by Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley notables to ensure that future superhuman AI was a benign force. The Tesla CEO parted ways with the lab in 2018, and last year it became a for-profit company and took a $1 billion investment from Microsoft. OpenAI’s leaders claim that only by commercializing its research for the benefit of investors can it raise the billions needed to keep pace on the frontiers of AI.
Thursday’s launch of OpenAI’s first commercial product completes the metamorphosis. A research institute created to compete with tech giants on superhuman AI is now challenging them in the more mundane arena of selling cloud services to businesses.
OpenAI’s service is built on a machine-learning technique that has made computers much better with language over the past two years. Machine-learning algorithms are directed to analyze vast collections of text scraped from the web to discover the statistical patterns in language use. The software can then be tuned to perform tasks like answering factual questions or summarizing documents.
Google has tapped the technology to improve how its search engine handles long queries, and Microsoft Office uses it to spot grammar glitches. OpenAI has focused on pushing the technique to greater scale and making software that generates text. Given a snatch of writing, it builds on it, unspooling sentences with similar statistical properties. The results can be uncannily smooth, if sometimes unmoored from reality.
Text generators like that can be fun—try one here—but haven’t p
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