OpenAI was founded in December 2015 as a non-profit AI research lab by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and others. It’s headquartered in San Francisco and has since become arguably the most influential AI company in the world. In 2019, it created a “capped profit” subsidiary to attract investment, with Microsoft becoming its largest backer at over $13 billion invested.
The company’s GPT series of large language models changed the industry. GPT-3 in 2020 showed what large-scale language models could do, but it was ChatGPT’s launch in November 2022 that made AI mainstream — it reached 100 million users in just two months, the fastest-growing consumer app at the time. GPT-4, released in March 2023, further pushed the boundaries of what these models could handle.
Beyond ChatGPT, OpenAI offers the GPT API platform used by thousands of businesses, DALL-E for image generation, Whisper for speech recognition, and Codex for code generation (which powered GitHub Copilot). Their enterprise offerings have grown rapidly, with major corporations integrating GPT into their workflows.
OpenAI’s valuation has soared past $150 billion in recent funding rounds. The company has also faced its share of drama — including Sam Altman’s brief firing and return in November 2023, and ongoing debates about AI safety. Love them or question them, there’s no denying that OpenAI has shaped the trajectory of modern AI more than any other single organization.
