OpenAI, headquartered in San Francisco, California, is one of the most influential artificial intelligence research and deployment companies in the world. Founded on December 11, 2015, by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman, the organization began as a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. Over time, OpenAI transitioned into a “capped-profit” model, allowing it to raise the massive capital needed to compete in the frontier AI race while keeping its mission-driven structure intact.
OpenAI is best known for its development of large language models, most prominently the GPT series, which reached mainstream awareness with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. ChatGPT quickly became the fastest-growing consumer application in history, introducing millions of people worldwide to the capabilities of generative AI. Today, OpenAI’s models power not only ChatGPT but also enterprise solutions integrated into Microsoft’s Azure cloud and its Copilot suite across Office, GitHub, and Windows.
Beyond text generation, OpenAI has also made significant strides in multimodal AI. Its models such as DALL·E (image generation), Whisper (speech recognition), and Codex (programming assistance) have each set benchmarks in their fields, helping to push AI into everyday workflows across industries. The company has also invested heavily in safety and alignment research, seeking to ensure that increasingly capable systems behave in accordance with human values.
By 2024, OpenAI’s GPT-4 and GPT-5 models had become foundational tools for both consumers and enterprises, fueling a wave of startups, educational applications, and productivity enhancements. Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar partnership with OpenAI solidified the company’s role as both a research pioneer and a commercial force, while giving it access to the computational resources required to train frontier-scale models.
Despite controversies around openness, governance, and competition with other labs, OpenAI remains at the center of the global AI conversation. Its influence stretches from Silicon Valley boardrooms to classrooms, newsrooms, and government policy debates around the world. Under the leadership of CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI continues to position itself as both a technological innovator and a steward of the debate over how humanity should manage the risks and rewards of advanced AI systems
