ORGANIZATION
OpenAI
Founded in December 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman and others as a non-profit research organisation pursuing safe artificial general intelligence. Initially committed to open publication of research, it shifted to a capped-profit subsidiary (OpenAI LP) in 2019. Through the GPT series, DALL·E, Whisper, and ChatGPT it became the centre of the generative-AI boom. With more than US$13 billion in cumulative investment from Microsoft, its character as a commercial organisation has steadily strengthened.
Organization
- Founded
- 2015
- Status
- Active
- Active for
- 11 years
- Appearances
- 04
- Name
- ENOpenAIJAOpenAI
Appearances
- July 2019Microsoft Invests US$1 Billion in OpenAIMicrosoft announced a US$1 billion investment in OpenAI alongside an exclusive cloud partnership. OpenAI was, at that point, a research organisation that had just released GPT-2; the deal nevertheless became the move that defined the industry structure once the generative-AI boom arrived in 2022–23. An additional US$10 billion in January 2023 and the integration of GPT-4 into Bing in February 2023 cemented Microsoft's lead in the AI competition.
- June 2020GPT-3 AnnouncedOpenAI's 175-billion-parameter language model. A more-than-hundredfold scale-up from GPT-2 (1.5B), it demonstrated 'few-shot' competence across text generation, summarisation, translation, and code—handling many tasks from a few in-prompt examples. The result pushed the research conversation toward scaling laws for large language models and reshaped the direction of AI investment.
- November 30, 2022ChatGPT LaunchedOpenAI made ChatGPT publicly available—GPT-3.5 fine-tuned for dialogue and accessible free through any browser. One million users within five days; one hundred million within two months (the fastest growth of any consumer internet service to that point). Overnight, generative AI moved from a specialist research conversation into homes, schools, and workplaces, and prompted strategic pivots at Google, Meta, Anthropic, and Microsoft.
- March 14, 2023GPT-4 — Going MultimodalOpenAI announced GPT-4. The first major LLM to accept image input, it posted top-decile scores on the US Bar exam and AP tests. Parameter counts, training data, and architectural details were withheld—marking OpenAI's shift from the 'publish-and-research' posture of GPT-3 toward a more commercially closed research organisation.