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 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 previously seen much commercial use. OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman says the latest generation is powerful and flexible enough for real work. “This is the first time we’ve got something we think is good enough to make into a product,” he says.
OpenAI’s new text generators are trained using a collection of almost a trillion words collected from the web and digitized books, on a supercomputer with hundreds of thousands of processors the company paid Microsoft to build, effectively returning some of the company’s $1 billion investment to its source.
The service is more open-ended than most AI cloud services, which usually perform one task, such as translation or image tagging, and are controlled with specific commands. Programmers who want to tap OpenAI’s technology simply submit human-readable text and get newly generated text back.
That may sound limiting, but by crafting the right input it’s possible to steer the software to perform different tasks. The goal is to try and massage it to riff on the statistical language patterns from a particular part of the internet.
Submitting examples of paragraphs rewritten for elementary schoolers followed by an unsimplified passage prompts the service to rewrite it to be easier to read. The service can answer factual questions or function as a chatbot if supplied with example Q&A pairs or turns of dialog that might direct the software to draw on its experience of factual statements or conversations.
