# OpenAI

> The company that made ChatGPT and turned AI into a household topic.

- Level: Basic
- Topics: Tech companies, AI
- URL: https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/openai/
- In Spanish: [OpenAI](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/es/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.

## An analogy

The company that turned a lab curiosity into a product everyone could try, the way the first iPhone did for smartphones. Others make comparable phones now, but that launch is the one people remember.

## Keep in mind

- Founded in 2015 as a nonprofit; today a for-profit structure under nonprofit control.
- ChatGPT (2022) made LLMs mainstream; the GPT models power it and the API.
- Microsoft is its main partner; its models run on Azure and inside Copilot.
- Also makes image, speech and video models (DALL-E, Whisper, Sora).

## Go deeper

- [openai.com](https://openai.com)
- [OpenAI developer platform](https://platform.openai.com/docs)
- [OpenAI on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI)

## Related terms

- [Artificial intelligence](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/artificial-intelligence/): Getting computers to do things that, until recently, only people could do.
- [ChatGPT](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/chatgpt/): OpenAI's chat assistant, the app that brought AI chatbots to the general public.
- [API](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/api/): The menu of things one program lets another program ask for.
- [Token](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/token/): The small chunk of text a language model actually reads.
- [Microsoft](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/microsoft/): The company of Windows and Office, now just as much a cloud company with Azure.
- [Cloud computing](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/cloud-computing/): Renting computers over the internet instead of buying your own.
- [Training and inference](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/training-and-inference/): Training builds the model once; inference is using it, millions of times a day.
- [AGI](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/agi/): A hypothetical AI able to do most mental tasks as well as a person. Not here yet.