Because of AI’s surprising history, it’s hard to predict when human-level AI might come within reach. When it does, it’ll be important to have a leading research institution which can prioritize a good outcome for all over its own self-interest.

We’re hoping to grow OpenAI into such an institution. As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents⁠ (if any) will be shared with the world. We’ll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies.

OpenAI’s research director is Ilya Sutskever⁠(opens in a new window), one of the world experts in machine learning. Our CTO is Greg Brockman⁠(opens in a new window), formerly the CTO of Stripe. The group’s other founding members are world-class research engineers and scientists: Trevor Blackwell⁠(opens in a new window), Vicki Cheung⁠(opens in a new window), Andrej Karpathy⁠(opens in a new window), Durk Kingma⁠(opens in a new window), John Schulman⁠(opens in a new window), Pamela Vagata⁠(opens in a new window), and Wojciech Zaremba⁠(opens in a new window). 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.

Sam, Greg, Elon, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research⁠(opens in a new window) are donating to support OpenAI. In total, these funders have committed $1 billion, although we expect to only spend a tiny fraction of this in the next few years.

You can follow us on Twitter at @OpenAI⁠(opens in a new window).