Date: 2024-01-23

Category: Design

How design helped OpenAI transition from niche to mainstream

With AI still one of the biggest talking points of the present – recently crowned the “word of the year” by Collins Dictionary – many flock to try each new product, whether for a bit of fun or to more seriously assess how it might impact their day-to-day lives.But the products for which OpenAI is best known – Dall-E and ChatGPT – were not OpenAI’s original focus. When founded in 2015 – by current CEO Sam Altman as well as Elon Musk, Carlos Virella, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman and Wojciech Zaremba – it was a research-focused non-profit, but by 2019 the company transitioned to a for-profit model. “At some point they realised they needed to raise more money and they created a product arm”, says Mark Jarecke, New York managing director of design agency Area 17, which has been working with the company on its branding and website since December 2021. Earlier in 2021, OpenAI had released text-to-image generator Dall-E and was gearing up to release ChatGPT in 2022. To match up with the growth in audience these products would bring, Area 17 was tasked “to prepare OpenAI for being a more public-facing company”, Jarecke says. “It was going to be getting a lot of attention, so this was really a moment for [OpenAI] to define itself”. Drawing on OpenAI’s original focus on the safe development of AI, the company still wanted to be “strongly defending” this notion, Jarecke says, as well as emphasising “the idea of precision: they had to be the most accurate”, he adds. Area 17 also conducted desk, interview and qualitative research to understand the new audiences that would interact with OpenAI’s more public-facing incarnation – including corporates, researchers and product users.