OpenAI Founded
Sam Altman, Elon Musk and others co-founded OpenAI to develop safe artificial intelligence
December 11, 2015
A Research Lab With a Remarkable Mission
OpenAI was founded on December 11, 2015, in San Francisco, California. Its founders included Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, John Schulman, and Elon Musk, among others. The organization was established as a nonprofit with a stated mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Backers committed over $1 billion in funding, though OpenAI said it expected to spend only a fraction of that over time. The founding reflected growing concern among technologists that AI development was accelerating rapidly and that safety research needed to keep pace. Elon Musk later left the board in 2018, citing potential conflicts with Tesla's AI work.
From Research to GPT
OpenAI's early work focused on reinforcement learning and robotics. In 2018, the organization introduced the first GPT model, which stood for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. GPT-2, released in 2019, attracted widespread attention when OpenAI initially withheld the full model, citing concerns about potential misuse for generating disinformation. GPT-3, released in 2020, was dramatically more powerful and capable of generating text that was often indistinguishable from human writing. OpenAI had restructured as a "capped-profit" company in 2019 to attract the investment needed to fund increasingly expensive AI training. Microsoft invested $1 billion as part of that restructuring and has since invested billions more.
ChatGPT and the AI Revolution
OpenAI released ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, making a conversational AI assistant freely available to the public. It reached one million users in five days and 100 million users in two months, becoming the fastest-growing consumer application in history at the time. ChatGPT sparked a global debate about the future of work, education, creativity, and the risks of advanced AI. Competitors including Google, Meta, and Anthropic accelerated their own AI development programs in response. OpenAI released GPT-4 in March 2023, significantly increasing capability. The founding of OpenAI in 2015 now appears as the starting point of one of the most consequential technological shifts of the 21st century.