companies

OpenAI

OpenAI is an American AI research and product company behind ChatGPT and the GPT model family, closely backed by Microsoft.

OpenAI was founded in December 2015 in San Francisco by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever and others as a non-profit AI research lab dedicated to ensuring artificial general intelligence benefits humanity. Musk left the board in 2018, and the organization restructured in 2019 into a "capped-profit" model to attract commercial investment, notably from Microsoft. OpenAI is best known for its GPT series of large language models and the ChatGPT conversational product, launched in November 2022, which drove mass-market adoption of generative AI. Its lineup also includes the DALL-E and Sora image/video models, the Codex coding agent, and an API platform used by millions of developers. The company experienced a high-profile governance crisis in November 2023 when its board briefly removed and then reinstated CEO Sam Altman. In 2025 OpenAI completed a restructuring into a public benefit corporation overseen by the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation, clearing the way for further outside investment. As of mid-2026, OpenAI remains one of the most valuable private AI companies, with reported valuations near $850 billion, deep ties to Microsoft, and reported plans for a possible future IPO while rapidly scaling its workforce.

Founded

2015

Headquarters

San Francisco, United States

Sector

lab