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Artificial Intelligence: OpenAI

Resources for Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education, ChatGPT, Dall-E, and others.

From OpenAI's website:

"OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity."

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity. We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome. To that end, we commit to the following principles:

Broadly Distributed Benefits
  • We commit to use any influence we obtain over AGI’s deployment to ensure it is used for the benefit of all, and to avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power.
  • Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity. We anticipate needing to marshal substantial resources to fulfill our mission, but will always diligently act to minimize conflicts of interest among our employees and stakeholders that could compromise broad benefit.
Long-Term Safety
  • We are committed to doing the research required to make AGI safe, and to driving the broad adoption of such research across the AI community.
  • We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions. Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project. We will work out specifics in case-by-case agreements, but a typical triggering condition might be “a better-than-even chance of success in the next two years.”
Technical Leadership
  • To be effective at addressing AGI’s impact on society, OpenAI must be on the cutting edge of AI capabilities—policy and safety advocacy alone would be insufficient.
  • We believe that AI will have broad societal impact before AGI, and we’ll strive to lead in those areas that are directly aligned with our mission and expertise.
Cooperative Orientation
  • We will actively cooperate with other research and policy institutions; we seek to create a global community working together to address AGI’s global challenges.
  • We are committed to providing public goods that help society navigate the path to AGI. Today this includes publishing most of our AI research, but we expect that safety and security concerns will reduce our traditional publishing in the future, while increasing the importance of sharing safety, policy, and standards research.

What is OpenAI?

OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and others in 2015. Their main focus is on developing artificial general intelligence (AGI), which allows an intelligent agent to learn or understand any intellectual task that a human is capable of.

Current Features

Dall-E Risks and Limitations

What is ChatGPT?

"ChatGPT is an advanced AI chatbot trained by OpenAI which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests."

ChatGPT Limitations

Limitations

  • ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers. Fixing this issue is challenging, as: (1) during RL training, there’s currently no source of truth; (2) training the model to be more cautious causes it to decline questions that it can answer correctly; and (3) supervised training misleads the model because the ideal answer depends on what the model knows, rather than what the human demonstrator knows.
  • ChatGPT is sensitive to tweaks to the input phrasing or attempting the same prompt multiple times. For example, given one phrasing of a question, the model can claim to not know the answer, but given a slight rephrase, can answer correctly.
  • The model is often excessively verbose and overuses certain phrases, such as restating that it’s a language model trained by OpenAI. These issues arise from biases in the training data (trainers prefer longer answers that look more comprehensive) and well-known over-optimization issues.12
  • Ideally, the model would ask clarifying questions when the user provided an ambiguous query. Instead, our current models usually guess what the user intended.
  • While we’ve made efforts to make the model refuse inappropriate requests, it will sometimes respond to harmful instructions or exhibit biased behavior. We’re using the Moderation API to warn or block certain types of unsafe content, but we expect it to have some false negatives and positives for now. We’re eager to collect user feedback to aid our ongoing work to improve this system.

From OpenAI's ChatGPT: Optimizing Language Models for Dialogue

More Information

For more information and resources on OpenAI, ChatGPT, and other AI & AGI, please see the Selected Scholarship page of this guide.