OpenAI
The AI lab behind ChatGPT and the GPT models, and the company that brought generative AI to the mainstream.
- Founded
- 2015
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, USA
- Funding
- Tens of billions raised; Microsoft as lead investor
- Founders
- Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk
Notable Products
- ChatGPT
- GPT models
- DALL·E
- Sora
About OpenAI
OpenAI began in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab dedicated to ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits humanity. It later adopted a capped-profit structure to raise the capital required for large-scale model training. CEO Sam Altman leads the company today; co-founder Ilya Sutskever was the long-time chief scientist before departing in 2024, and Mira Murati served as CTO during the GPT-4 era.
Impact
The 2022 launch of ChatGPT turned OpenAI into a household name and triggered the generative AI boom. Its GPT model family, developer API, and image and video models made the company the central reference point of the modern AI industry, anchored by a deep partnership with Microsoft. Early researcher Andrej Karpathy was a founding member before his Tesla detour and brief return.