OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence (AI)

OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence (AI) research company that aims to promote and develop friendly AI in such a way as to benefit humanity as a whole. The organization aims to "freely collaborate" with other institutions and researchers by making its patents and research open to the public The founders (notably Elon Musk and Sam Altman) are motivated in part by concerns about existential risk from artificial general intelligence

In October 2015, Musk, Altman and other investors announced the formation of the organization, pledging over US$1 billion to the venture.

On April 27, 2016, OpenAI released a public beta of "OpenAI Gym", its platform for reinforcement learning research

On December 5, 2016, OpenAI released Universe, a software platform for measuring and training an AI's general intelligence across the world's supply of games, websites and other applications.
 

During The International 2017 Dota 2 video game tournament in August 2017, OpenAI let a machine-learned bot play 1v1 demonstration game against professional Dota 2 player, Dendi, who played against it live and lost. After the demonstration, CTO Greg Brockman explained that the bot had learned by playing against itself for two weeks of real time and that the learning software was a step in the direction of creating software that can handle complex tasks "like being a surgeon".

Motives
Some scientists, such as Stephen Hawking and Stuart Russell, believe that if advanced AI someday gains the ability to re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate, an unstoppable "intelligence explosion" could lead to human extinction. Musk characterizes AI as humanity's biggest existential threat. OpenAL's founders structured it as a non-profit so that they could focus its research on creating a positive long-term human impact.
 

OpenAI states that "it's hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society," and that it's equally difficult to comprehend "how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly. Research on safety cannot safely be postponed: "because of AI's surprising history, it's hard to predict when human-level AI might come within reach." OpenAI states that AI "should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible..." Co-chair Sam Altman expects the decades-long project to surpass human intelligence.
 

Vishal Sikka, a former CEO of Infosys, stated that an "openness" where the endeavor would "produce results generally in the greater interest of humanity" was a fundamental requirement for his support and that OpenAI "aligns very nicely with our long-held values" and their "endeavor to do purposeful work". Cade Metz of Wired suggests that corporations such as Amazon may be motivated by a desire to use open-source software and data to level the playing field against corporations such as Google and Facebook that own enormous supplies of proprietary data. Altman states that Y Combinator companies will share their data with OpenAI.