OpenAI

History

OpenAI was founded in December 2015 as a non-profit AI research laboratory by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and others, with an initial pledge of US$1 billion in funding. Its stated mission is to "ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity."

In 2019, OpenAI transitioned to a "capped-profit" structure under OpenAI LP, allowing it to attract significant investment. Microsoft invested US$1 billion that year, followed by an additional US$10 billion commitment in 2023.

Notable releases

• GPT-2 (2019) — initially withheld over misuse concerns; later released in full
• GPT-3 (2020) — 175B parameters; powered the first generation of language-model apps
• DALL·E (2021) — text-to-image generation
• ChatGPT (Nov 2022) — free conversational interface that reached 100 million users in two months, the fastest-growing consumer app in history
• GPT-4 (Mar 2023) — multimodal (text+image input)
• GPT-4o (May 2024) — natively multimodal (text, audio, vision)
• o-series (2024–) — reasoning models with chain-of-thought
• GPT-5 (2025) — frontier multimodal generalist model
• Sora (2024) — text-to-video generation

Governance crisis

In November 2023, the board of directors briefly removed Sam Altman as CEO, citing communication concerns. Following an employee revolt and pressure from Microsoft, Altman was reinstated within a week, and the board was restructured.

Business model

OpenAI provides API access to its models, charges per million tokens, and offers a consumer subscription (ChatGPT Plus/Pro/Enterprise). It partners closely with Microsoft, whose Azure platform hosts all OpenAI workloads.