OpenAI

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and deployment organization founded in December 2015 in San Francisco as a nonprofit. Its early backers, including Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, John Schulman and others, pledged around $1 billion to pursue the goal of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. In 2019 the organization created a capped‑profit for‑profit subsidiary in order to raise significantly more capital while keeping the original nonprofit in control. In 2025 this structure was simplified when the subsidiary was converted into OpenAI Group PBC, a public benefit corporation that is partially owned and governed by the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation, with Microsoft holding roughly a quarter of the equity through its long‑standing investment and cloud partnership. OpenAI is best known for the GPT family of large language models, the DALL‑E image models, the Sora video models, and the o‑series reasoning models such as o1, alongside widely used products like ChatGPT and the OpenAI API platform. These systems have helped trigger the global boom in generative AI and are deployed to millions of users and developers. Alongside capabilities research, OpenAI invests heavily in safety, alignment and governance work, including red‑teaming and external evaluations of major models, preparedness and risk‑assessment frameworks, and research on techniques such as reinforcement learning from human feedback and scalable oversight. By the mid‑2020s OpenAI had grown to several thousand employees and become one of the world’s most highly valued private technology companies, supported by multi‑billion‑dollar funding rounds and strategic partnerships.