What it is: OpenAI is the AI company that makes ChatGPT, the GPT language models, DALL-E, Sora, and other AI products.
Who it’s for: Anyone trying to keep the AI companies straight — OpenAI vs Anthropic vs Google DeepMind.
Best if: You want to know who built ChatGPT and what else they make.
Skip if: You already know the AI lab landscape.
OpenAI is the artificial intelligence research and deployment company that built ChatGPT. Founded in San Francisco in December 2015, it has become the most-recognized AI company in the world. Its products and models — including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GPT-5, the o-series reasoning models, DALL-E (image generation), Sora (video generation), Whisper (speech-to-text), and ChatGPT itself — have shaped how the public uses AI in the 2020s.
OpenAI’s stated mission is “to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” It originally launched as a non-profit, then restructured into a capped-profit company in 2019 to attract the capital needed to build large AI models. By mid-2026 OpenAI is valued at around $300 billion and serves over 700 million weekly users through ChatGPT alone. The company is led by CEO Sam Altman.
Founders and key people
OpenAI was co-founded by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, and others. Musk departed in 2018; Sutskever and several senior researchers left in 2024 to start independent AI safety efforts (some founding Anthropic earlier in 2021, others starting new ventures in 2024-2025). Sam Altman remains CEO. See our Sam Altman profile for the longer biography.
What OpenAI makes
- ChatGPT — the consumer AI assistant (free, Plus, Pro, Team, Enterprise tiers).
- The GPT models — GPT-4, GPT-4o, GPT-5, and the o-series reasoning models (o1, o3, o4-mini, etc.). See our o3 and o4-mini guide.
- The OpenAI API — the developer endpoint that lets engineers build their own apps on top of GPT models. See our OpenAI API for Beginners post.
- DALL-E — text-to-image generation, now built into ChatGPT.
- Sora — text-to-video generation.
- Whisper — free open-source speech-to-text. See our Whisper post.
- Custom GPTs and the GPT Store — user-created mini-apps powered by GPT. See our Custom GPTs glossary entry.
- ChatGPT Operator and Atlas browser — agentic capabilities that let ChatGPT browse and take actions on your behalf.
- OpenAI Agents SDK — open-source developer toolkit for building agentic applications.
Who OpenAI competes with
Anthropic (makes Claude), Google DeepMind (makes Gemini), Meta AI (Llama), xAI (Grok), Mistral, DeepSeek, and a growing list of smaller labs. See our three-way comparison for the consumer-side battle.
Related terms: ChatGPT, Custom GPTs, Large Language Model (LLM), Chatbot, Prompt Engineering, Reasoning Models.
Learn more: Sam Altman: The Man Behind OpenAI and ChatGPT, OpenAI API for Beginners, OpenAI’s notable research papers, ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini. Get every OpenAI update as it ships in our free daily Beginners in AI newsletter.
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