OpenAI
Founded as a nonprofit artificial-intelligence research lab with the mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity, later adding a “capped-profit” arm.
Founded2015
HeadquartersSan Francisco, CA
IndustryArtificial Intelligence
The Pioneer Building, San Francisco — OpenAI headquarters · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Overview
OpenAI brought generative AI into the mainstream.
Founders
Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, Wojciech Zaremba and John Schulman
Founded December 11, 2015
Landmark Achievements
- Released the GPT series of large language models, with GPT-3 (2020) demonstrating remarkable few-shot learning at scale.
- Launched ChatGPT in November 2022, which reached an estimated 100 million users in two months — among the fastest-growing consumer apps ever.
- Shipped DALL·E image generation and GPT-4 (2023), catalyzing the global generative-AI boom and a wave of AI investment.
OpenAI's place in the story
Continue through the chronicle — the builders of American technology, in founding order.