Also known as: OpenAI Inc, OpenAI LP, OpenAI Global LLC
OpenAI is the AI research company that brought large language models into mainstream consciousness through ChatGPT. Founded in December 2015 as a non-profit with the mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity, OpenAI has undergone dramatic evolution - from non-profit to "capped-profit," from research lab to produc...
Key Metrics
Valuation
Revenue (ARR)
Headcount
Funding Rounds
Coding Market Share
Enterprise Market Share
Facts
37Other Data
| Title | Date | EventType | Description | Significance | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Converted to Public Benefit Corporation | 2025 | pivot | Converted from capped-profit LLC; cumulative funding reaches $59.9B (including $11B+ Microsoft and a $40B SoftBank round). | major | |
| o3-mini released | 2025 | launch | Efficient reasoning model; broader reasoning availability. | moderate | |
| o3 preview released | 2024 | launch | Next-generation reasoning model; near-frontier performance on some tasks. | moderate | |
| o1 reasoning model released | 2024 | launch | Advanced chain-of-thought; mathematical/scientific reasoning advances; raised hidden reasoning and deception risks. | major | |
| Board crisis and Sam Altman ouster/return | 2023-11 | leadership-change | Brief removal of Sam Altman by the non-profit board, followed by his return; restructured board with commercial representation. | major | |
| GPT-4 released | 2023-03 | launch | Undisclosed multimodal model; human-level performance on many tasks; dangerous capabilities acknowledged. | major | |
| ChatGPT launched | 2022-11 | launch | InstructGPT/ChatGPT (GPT-3.5 + RLHF) drove mainstream AI adoption; established RLHF as a standard alignment technique. | major | |
| GPT-3 released (175B parameters) | 2020 | launch | Few-shot learning breakthrough that sparked the modern scaling race. | major | |
| GPT-2 released (1.5B parameters) | 2019 | launch | Initially withheld due to misuse concerns; demonstrated growing capability of large language models. | major | |
| Restructured to capped-profit LLC | 2019 | pivot | Created OpenAI LP capped-profit subsidiary to raise commercial capital while preserving the non-profit parent. | major | |
| GPT-1 released (117M parameters) | 2018 | launch | First transformer language model from OpenAI; established the architecture. | moderate | |
| Founded as non-profit with ~$1B founder commitment | 2015 | founding | Founding mission "AGI benefits all humanity"; "open by default" research publishing, "safety over competitive advantage." | major |
Divisions
3Tracks, evaluates, forecasts, and protects against catastrophic risks from frontier AI models. Led by Aleksander Madry (after Leopoldas Aschenbrenner left).
Responsible for content policy, monitoring, and safety tooling for deployed models
1 inactive division
Led by Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike. Aimed to solve alignment for superintelligent AI within 4 years using 20% of compute. Dissolved May 2024 after leadership departures.
Prediction Markets
50 activeRelated Wiki Pages
Top Related Pages
Anthropic
An AI safety company founded by former OpenAI researchers that develops frontier AI models while pursuing safety research, including the Claude mod...
AI Alignment
Technical approaches to ensuring AI systems pursue intended goals and remain aligned with human values throughout training and deployment. Current ...
OpenAI Foundation
Nonprofit organization holding 26% equity stake (~$130B) in OpenAI Group PBC, with governance control through board appointment rights and philanth...
Weak-to-Strong Generalization
Weak-to-strong generalization investigates whether weak supervisors can reliably elicit good behavior from stronger AI systems.
Sam Altman
CEO of OpenAI since 2019, former Y Combinator president, and central figure in AI development.