OpenAI

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco. It was founded in December 2015 by a group that included Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever and Elon Musk. It began as a nonprofit research lab and later added a for-profit arm, with Microsoft as a major investor.

Its best known product is ChatGPT, a chatbot released in November 2022 that brought mass attention to generative AI. The company also trains the GPT family of language models, the DALL-E image models, Whisper for speech recognition and Sora for video. Developers reach the models through an API.

OpenAI sells subscription plans to individuals and businesses. It has been the subject of public debate over safety, its governance and its move away from the original nonprofit structure. Altman was briefly removed as chief executive in November 2023 and returned within days. Altman remains chief executive. In 2025 OpenAI reorganized its structure so that the for-profit company is controlled by a nonprofit foundation. The company also builds Codex for software development and runs a store of custom GPTs.