OpenAI

OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco, founded in December 2015 by a group of co-founders that included Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman and Trevor Blackwell, with Musk and Altman serving as initial co-chairs before Musk departed in 2018. The company develops proprietary generative AI models, most notably its GPT series of large language models, with a stated mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The release of ChatGPT by OpenAI in November 2022 has been credited with helping to catalyze a broader boom in AI adoption, and ChatGPT ranked as the fifth most visited website in the world as of September 2026. Beyond ChatGPT, the company produces GPT Image models and the AI coding tool Codex. OpenAI converted from nonprofit to a capped-profit structure in 2019 and restructured again in 2025 to become a public benefit corporation; Microsoft has invested more than 13 billion dollars in the company, which filed for an initial public offering in June 2026.