OpenAI is a prominent artificial intelligence[1] (AI) research organization that was established in December 2015. It was founded by a group of technology[2] entrepreneurs, including Elon Musk and Sam Altman, to develop and promote friendly AI for the benefit of all of humanity. As an organization, OpenAI places a significant emphasis on openness, collaboration, and transparency, often partnering with other institutions in their research. OpenAI has been funded with over $1 billion and is based in San Francisco. The organization has developed various AI platforms, such as OpenAI Gym and Universe, and has also introduced several groundbreaking AI models, including GPT-3[5] and DALL-E[4]. In a significant shift in 2019, OpenAI transitioned to a capped for-profit model to attract more funding, with profits capped at 100 times the investment. They have also collaborated with Microsoft[3] on a $1 billion investment. OpenAI’s research and models have wide-ranging commercial applications, driving the future of AI technology.
OpenAI is a U.S.-based artificial intelligence (AI) research organization founded in December 2015, researching artificial intelligence with the goal of developing "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence, which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work". As one of the leading organizations of the AI spring, it has developed several large language models, advanced image generation models, and previously, released open-source models. Its release of ChatGPT has been credited with starting the AI spring.
Industry | Information technology |
---|---|
Founded | December 11, 2015 |
Headquarters | San Francisco, California, U.S. |
Key people | |
Products | OpenAI Five |
Revenue | US$28 million (2022) |
US$−540 million (2022) | |
Number of employees | c. 1,200 (2024) |
Website | openai.com |
The organization consists of the non-profit OpenAI, Inc. registered in Delaware and its for-profit subsidiary OpenAI Global, LLC. It was founded by Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Jessica Livingston, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk serving as the initial Board of Directors members. Microsoft provided OpenAI Global LLC with a $1 billion investment in 2019 and a $10 billion investment in 2023, with a significant portion of the investment in the form of computational resources on Microsoft's Azure cloud service.
On November 17, 2023, the board removed Altman as CEO, while Brockman was removed as chairman and then resigned as president. Four days later, both returned after negotiations with the board, and most of the board members resigned. The new initial board included former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor as chairman. It was also announced that Microsoft will have a non-voting board seat.