OpenAI

OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence company founded in 2015 by Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and Elon Musk. Originally established as a nonprofit research lab in San Francisco, the organization was partly motivated by concerns about AI safety and the existential risks of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Musk and Altman envisioned a lab that would act as a counter to profit-driven companies developing similar technology.

Key Milestones:

• 2015: Founded with $1 billion in pledges from early backers including Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services, and Infosys
• 2019: Sam Altman became full-time CEO; OpenAI created a 'capped profit' subsidiary to attract investment, with Microsoft investing $1 billion
• 2020: Released GPT-3, demonstrating unprecedented language capabilities
• 2021: Launched DALL-E for AI image generation
• 2022: Released ChatGPT in November - gained 1 million users within 5 days, bringing AI to mainstream public attention
• 2023: Launched GPT-4; dramatic boardroom crisis in November where Altman was briefly fired then reinstated
• 2024: Released GPT-4o (multimodal), o1 (reasoning), and Sora (video generation)
• 2025: Launched GPT-5, o3, and restructured into a hybrid model with a nonprofit foundation holding 26% stake in the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC; raised $40 billion - the largest venture deal ever
• 2026: Released GPT-5.2; acqui-hired OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger; seeking up to $100 billion in new funding at an $830 billion valuation with a Q4 2026 IPO planned

Products & Services:

• ChatGPT: Consumer AI assistant - free tier (GPT-5.2 with limits), Plus ($20/mo), Pro ($200/mo). Over 1 million business customers and 7 million workplace seats
• API Platform: Developer access to GPT, o-series reasoning, DALL-E, Whisper (speech recognition), and embedding models
• ChatGPT Health: Dedicated health product launched January 2026, integrated with Apple Health and MyFitnessPal
• DALL-E 3: Text-to-image generation
• Sora: Text-to-video generation
• Whisper: Open-source speech recognition

Financials (2025–2026):

• Revenue reached $13 billion in 2025 (236% YoY growth from $3.7B in 2024)
• Annualized revenue exceeded $20 billion by late 2025
• Projected $14 billion loss in 2026; cumulative cash burn through 2029 expected at $115 billion
• Agent revenue projected to reach $29 billion by 2029

Leadership: Sam Altman (CEO), Mira Murati (former CTO, departed 2024), Greg Brockman (President). Approximately 4,000 employees as of 2026.