OpenAI

Creating safe AGI that benefits all of humanity

OpenAI was founded in December 2015 as a nonprofit AI research company by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and others, with the stated goal of developing safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) for the benefit of humanity. In 2019, the organization restructured, creating OpenAI LP as a capped-profit subsidiary to attract the capital necessary for increasingly expensive AI research. The company has produced some of the most influential AI systems in the world. The GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) series—GPT-1 through GPT-4—has been foundational to the modern AI revolution. ChatGPT, launched in November 2022, became the fastest-growing consumer application in history, reaching 100 million users in just two months and fundamentally reshaping public perception of AI capabilities. Beyond language models, OpenAI has developed DALL-E for image generation, Whisper for speech recognition, Sora for video generation, and Codex for code generation. These products demonstrate the company's breadth across multiple AI modalities and its commitment to pushing the boundaries of what AI can achieve. OpenAI has formed a deep strategic partnership with Microsoft, which has invested billions of dollars and integrated OpenAI's models into its products, including Azure AI services and Microsoft Copilot. The company has also faced significant internal challenges and public scrutiny, including the dramatic board upheaval in November 2023, which saw Sam Altman briefly removed and then reinstated as CEO. In October 2024, OpenAI raised $6.6 billion at a $157 billion valuation in one of the largest funding rounds in history, led by Thrive Capital with participation from Microsoft, NVIDIA, SoftBank, and others.