OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence research and deployment company founded in December 2015 by a group that included Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and others. It began as a non-profit research lab with the stated mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity, later adopting a capped-profit structure under OpenAI LP to attract the capital needed to train large-scale models.
The company is best known for the GPT family of large language models and ChatGPT, the conversational assistant that reached hundreds of millions of weekly users and triggered the modern generative-AI boom. Its product portfolio also spans the DALL-E image models, the Sora video model, the Whisper speech system, embeddings, and a developer API used by millions of applications and enterprises.
OpenAI operates a deep strategic partnership with Microsoft, which has invested over thirteen billion dollars and provides Azure compute for training and inference. The company has raised additional multi-billion-dollar rounds from investors including Thrive Capital and SoftBank, reaching one of the highest private valuations in technology history.
Under CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI ships frequent model upgrades, an enterprise tier, custom GPTs, and agentic tooling, while maintaining a substantial alignment and safety research effort. It competes directly with Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI, and Meta.
For businesses and developers, OpenAI offers some of the most capable general-purpose models available, backed by mature APIs, but at premium pricing and with periodic capacity and policy constraints.