What is OpenAI?

OpenAI is a research organization founded in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman. As stated on the OpenAI web page, its mission is “to ensure that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity”. As it is general, AGI is intended to have the ability to learn and perform a wide range of tasks, without the need for task-specific programming.

Since 2015, OpenAI has focused its research on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), a subset of machine learning (ML) that combines Reinforcement Learning (RL) with deep neural networks. The first contribution in that field traces back to 2016 when the company released OpenAI Gym, a toolkit for researchers to develop and test RL algorithms.

Figure 2.1 – Landing page of Gym documentation (https://www.gymlibrary.dev/)

OpenAI kept researching and contributing in that field, yet its most notable achievements...