OpenAI

OpenAI is the company that made AI something everyone talks about. It was founded in 2015 in San Francisco as a nonprofit research lab, with Sam Altman among its founders and now its CEO, and it builds the GPT family of large language models. On 30 November 2022 it released ChatGPT, a chat interface on top of GPT, and it became one of the fastest-adopted consumer products in history. For many people 'ChatGPT' is still the name of the whole category.

What it sells: ChatGPT subscriptions for individuals and companies; an API where developers pay per token to use GPT models, image generation, speech-to-text (Whisper) and video generation (Sora) inside their own products; and enterprise deals. Microsoft is its largest partner and investor: OpenAI's models run on Microsoft's Azure cloud and power Copilot across Windows and Office.

Its structure is unusual and has changed several times. OpenAI started as a nonprofit, created a for-profit subsidiary in 2019 to raise the money that training frontier models requires, and reorganized again in 2025 into a public benefit corporation still controlled by the nonprofit. The tension between its original mission ('ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity') and the commercial race has been a recurring source of news, including the brief removal and return of Altman as CEO in November 2023.

Why it matters: it set the pace. GPT-3 showed that scaling up models produced surprising abilities, ChatGPT showed the public cared, and since then every big tech company has been racing to match it. OpenAI is also one of the largest buyers of NVIDIA GPUs and is building its own data centers through the Stargate project.