What is OpenAI and who runs it?

OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco, best known for creating ChatGPT. It was founded in December 2015 by a group that included Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever and others, with the stated mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

OpenAI started as a non-profit research lab. In 2019, it created a for-profit arm with a "capped profit" structure to raise the large amounts of money needed for computing power and talent. In 2025, it restructured again, turning its main business into a public benefit corporation while keeping a non-profit foundation in control. Sam Altman serves as chief executive. Elon Musk left the board in 2018 and later became a vocal critic, filing lawsuits against the company, and went on to start his own AI company, xAI.

Microsoft has been OpenAI's most important partner, investing billions of dollars and providing cloud computing through Azure. Microsoft also uses OpenAI's models in products such as Copilot. The partnership has been renegotiated over time, giving both companies more flexibility to work with others.

OpenAI's major milestones include the GPT series of language models, starting with GPT in 2018 and GPT-2 in 2019, followed by GPT-3 in 2020 which showed how powerful large language models could be. DALL-E, its image generation model, appeared in 2021. ChatGPT launched in November 2022 and became one of the fastest-growing consumer apps in history, starting the generative AI boom. Later came GPT-4, reasoning models, voice and image features, the Sora video model, the Codex coding agent and open-weight models released for developers.

Its main products today include ChatGPT for consumers and businesses, the OpenAI API for developers, coding tools and enterprise offerings.

OpenAI has also faced controversies and debates, including leadership turmoil in November 2023 when Altman was briefly removed and then reinstated, lawsuits over the use of copyrighted material in training, questions about safety practices and debates over its shift from non-profit roots.

Whatever one's view, OpenAI is one of the most influential companies in AI, and ChatGPT remains the product through which hundreds of millions of people first experienced generative AI.