OpenAI
The lab behind GPT and ChatGPT
WHAT IT IS
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a non-profit research lab aiming to advance general-purpose AI safely. From 2018 it moved to a capped-profit structure with investment from Microsoft, turning research into APIs and consumer products. Its main line is the GPT family of autoregressive language models, which established pretraining plus human-feedback fine-tuning as the conversation-model recipe. ChatGPT launched in November 2022, bringing large language models into everyday use.
Why it matters
It turned pretraining plus human-feedback fine-tuning into the standard recipe for chat models, and its 2022 release of ChatGPT brought large models to a mass audience — after which the industry set its release cadence and pricing around OpenAI.
Key milestones
- 2015
Founded as a non-profit
- 2019
Moved to a capped-profit structure with Microsoft investment
- 2022
ChatGPT launched and reached over 100 million users within two months
Representative products
6Whisper
2022Transcribes speech in many languages and translates it into English
ChatGPT
2022The chat window that put a large language model in everyone’s hands
DALL·E 3
2023Rewrites a long prompt into a detailed description, then draws the image
Sora
2024Generates coherent video up to about a minute long from a description
GPT-4o
2024A natively multimodal general model, with text, image and audio through one door
o3
2025It reasons at length before answering, trading inference-time compute for steadier accuracy