2015 — 2024
The Story of
OpenAI
From a $1 billion research pledge to reshaping human civilization — the decade that changed everything about intelligence.
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From a $1 billion research pledge to reshaping human civilization — the decade that changed everything about intelligence.
By The Numbers
Valuation
0
As of 2024
ChatGPT Users
0M+
Monthly active
API Customers
0M+
Developers worldwide
Funding Raised
0B+
Total investment
2015 — 2024
Nine years of relentless research, breakthrough products, and pivotal decisions.
Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman co-found OpenAI as a non-profit AI research company with $1 billion in pledged funding.
OpenAI releases Gym, a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms, becoming a cornerstone resource for the AI research community.
The first Generative Pre-trained Transformer is introduced — a 117M parameter model demonstrating the power of unsupervised pre-training for NLP tasks.
GPT-2 with 1.5 billion parameters is deemed 'too dangerous to release fully.' OpenAI staggers release over months due to concerns about misuse for generating fake news.
OpenAI transitions to a 'capped profit' model, creating OpenAI LP to attract investment while maintaining its original mission. Investors capped at 100x returns.
GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters stuns the world. The model can write code, essays, poetry, and answer questions with near-human fluency, sparking global AI excitement.
DALL·E demonstrates the ability to create images from text descriptions, merging language and vision AI in a way never seen before.
OpenAI's Codex model powers GitHub Copilot, revolutionizing software development by suggesting code in real-time directly in code editors.
DALL·E 2 produces dramatically more realistic and accurate images, with new inpainting and outpainting capabilities that transform creative workflows.
ChatGPT becomes the fastest consumer product to reach 100 million users in history — just 2 months after launch. The world's relationship with AI is forever changed.
GPT-4, a multimodal model, achieves human-level performance on numerous professional benchmarks including the bar exam, SAT, and medical licensing exams.
Sam Altman is fired by the board, triggering a five-day crisis. 95% of employees threaten to resign. Microsoft offers jobs to all. Altman returns as CEO with a reconstituted board.
Sora generates stunning minute-long photorealistic videos from text prompts, setting a new benchmark for generative video and leaving the AI world in awe.
GPT-4o ('omni') delivers real-time voice, vision, and text interaction with human-like emotion and speed — the closest thing yet to a digital companion.
OpenAI o1 introduces chain-of-thought reasoning, achieving PhD-level performance in physics, chemistry, and biology, and ranking in the top 500 of competitive programming.
Products & Models
Each product redefined what was thought possible, setting new standards for AI capabilities.
The world's most-used AI assistant
Voice, vision & text in real-time
Photorealistic image generation
Text-to-video generation
Powers GitHub Copilot
PhD-level scientific reasoning
Our Mission
“Ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”
— OpenAI Charter
Leadership
Visionaries who bet their careers on the most consequential technology in human history.
CEO
Since 2019Co-founder & President
Since 2015Co-founder & Chief Scientist
Since 2015CTO
Since 2018Model Evolution
From 117 million to trillions of parameters — the exponential scale of language models.
* GPT-4 parameter count is estimated; OpenAI has not officially disclosed the exact number