The company behind ChatGPT
OpenAI is the American AI company that develops and provides ChatGPT. Founded in 2015 around the goal of building AGI that benefits all of humanity, it triggered the global generative AI boom with the release of ChatGPT in 2022. CEO Sam Altman appears constantly in coverage as the emblematic executive of the era.
Main products
- ChatGPT: effectively synonymous with conversational AI
- The GPT series: the LLMs behind ChatGPT, also embedded in other companies’ services through the API
- Sora: video generation from text
- Image generation, voice conversation, and agent features across most of generative AI
How it got here
It began as a non-profit and later adopted an unusual structure with a commercial arm, and it holds a deep partnership with Microsoft, supplying the technology behind Copilot. The 2023 episode in which Altman was removed and reinstated made its governance a recurring subject of debate.
Position in the industry
It continues to set the direction of the field with frontier model releases, and its announcements move competitors and markets. The earlier position of clear dominance has given way to serious competition from Anthropic with Claude and Google with Gemini. It remains the first proper noun to learn when reading AI news.
It is one of the few companies whose internal developments are themselves AI news — model launches, pricing changes, partnerships, and personnel all reach anyone using AI. Approaching it as the ChatGPT company first and learning the corporate side gradually gives you a fuller picture of the industry.
Despite Open in the name, the flagship models are closed. That point comes up regularly in debates about open source models.