What is OpenAI? Everything You Need to Know

After the launch of ChatGPT, OpenAI has emerged as one of the most influential AI companies in the world. This hot AI startup is now valued at $500 billion, and the entire AI industry is somehow banking on OpenAI to succeed. If you are new to the AI world and want to understand what is OpenAI, let’s go through our in-depth explainer.

What is OpenAI?

OpenAI is a leading AI company based in the US and the creator of ChatGPT, the widely popular AI chatbot. OpenAI was founded in 2015 by a group of tech luminaries including Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman and seven other co-founders. The mission of OpenAI is to create “safe and beneficial” AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) that “benefits all of humanity”.

By AGI, OpenAI means “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work”. OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022 and following that, the Generative AI era began which started the global AI race. OpenAI is largely seen as the company that made AI mainstream and accessible to the general public.

Started with a commitment of one billion dollars in funding, OpenAI is now valued at around $500 billion. It began as a non-profit organization, but recently OpenAI transitioned to a for-profit structure where the OpenAI Foundation (non-profit) holds 26% stake, Microsoft holds 27%, and the remaining 47% is owned by employees and other investors.

In the Artificial Intelligence (AI) race, OpenAI is seen as the top AI lab, challenging companies like Google and Anthropic. After all, OpenAI was the first company to publicly introduce an AI chatbot like ChatGPT, powered by the GPT-3.5 model. Now, OpenAI has 800 million weekly active users who use ChatGPT, much higher than Google or Anthropic.

Major AI Models Launched by OpenAI

OpenAI is known for its GPT-series of AI models. Google introduced the groundbreaking Transformer architecture in 2017 and just after that, OpenAI launched the GPT-1 model leveraging the Transformer architecture. GPT-1 was trained on 117 million parameters. Next, in 2019, OpenAI launched GPT-2 with 1.5 billion parameters.

Now in 2020, OpenAI announced GPT-3 and scaled it up to 175 billion parameters. It could generate human-like text across various domains. Come 2022 and GPT-3.5 was launched and it powered the initial version of ChatGPT. This turned out to be the watershed moment in AI history.

Following that, in 2023, OpenAI came up with GPT-4 which was even more powerful. Then we saw the multimodal GPT-4o launch, along with OpenAI’s reasoning models including o1, o3, and o4. Finally, in 2025, OpenAI launched GPT-4.5, GPT-5 and then GPT-5.1. The latest GPT-5 series has integrated both thinking and non-thinking AI models.

OpenAI has also released its powerful ChatGPT Agent, Deep Research AI agent, and Shopping Research agent. Besides that, OpenAI launched Dall -E in 2021 to generate AI images. The company followed it up with Dall -E 2 in 2022 and Dall -E 3 in 2023. For image generation, OpenAI has stopped training Diffusion models and now uses the multimodal capability of GPT-series models to produce AI images.

As for videos, OpenAI launched Sora, in 2024, its first text-to-video generation model. And finally in 2025, Sora 2 was announced with improve physics simulation and synchronized audio.

The Failed Coup to Remove Sam Altman from OpenAI

When we talk about OpenAI, we can’t miss Sam Altman’s firing and subsequent reinstatement. In November 2023, OpenAI’s board, led by Ilya Sutskever fired OpenAI’s CEO and co-founder Sam Altman for not being “consistently candid in his communications.” It seemed similar to Elon Musk’s departure from OpenAI when he tried to take over the leadership at the company.

However, OpenAI employees stood behind its CEO and soon, Altman was back as the CEO of OpenAI. The new board was appointed and all the people who were behind Altman’s ouster slowly left the company. First, Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI and then John Schulman moved to Anthropic. Following that, Mira Murati left the company to build her own venture, Thinking Machines Lab.

Several safety researchers also resigned from the company saying that OpenAI was more focused on building profitable products rather than putting its focus on building safe AI.

Among all the co-founders, only Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Wojciech Zaremba are left at OpenAI. Currently, the OpenAI board members include Sam Altman, Bret Taylor (Chair), Adam D’Angelo, Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann, Dr. Zico Kolter, Retired U.S. Army General Paul M. Nakasone, Adebayo Ogunlesi, and Nicole Seligman.

OpenAI’s Pivot to a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC)

OpenAI was founded as a non-profit, but to attract investment, the company created a hybrid structure with a “capped-profit” subsidiary in 2019. While this for-profit entity could attract investment, it was controlled by the non-profit board. This allowed OpenAI to get major investments from Microsoft, including access to Azure infrastructure, which proved a great decision.

However, in 2025, OpenAI wanted to become a fully for-profit company. Several public intellectuals and AGs of Delaware and California pushed back on this idea. OpenAI finally dropped its for-profit plan and announced that it will be controlled by the current non-profit. However, the existing for-profit will become a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) so that the company can raise capital more freely.

What is OpenAI’s Future?

OpenAI is continuing its research to achieve its founding mission — to develop safe AGI. However, before that, the company seems more focused on building profitable products for consumers and enterprises. OpenAI recently acquired IO, an AI hardware startup founded by Apple design chief Jony Ive. The company is aiming to release an AI device in 2026, but without a screen.

Apart from that, critics say that OpenAI is no longer “open” as the company has stopped sharing its research with the open-source community. It’s also favoring commercial success over safety and non-profit ideals. While OpenAI remains at the forefront of AI development, the company must not forget its founding principle to build safe and beneficial AGI.