OpenAI
OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization headquartered in San Francisco, consisting of OpenAI Group PBC, a for-profit public benefit corporation (PBC), partially controlled by OpenAI Foundation, a nonprofit. OpenAI develops generative AI models, particularly the GPT series of large language models. Its release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has been credited with catalyzing the AI boom, and widespread interest in generative AI. OpenAI was founded in 2015 in Delaware as a nonprofit. A for-profit subsidiary of the nonprofit was created in 2019, and a 2025 restructuring converted the subsidiary into a PBC that is 26% owned by the nonprofit. Microsoft previously invested over $13 billion into OpenAI, and provides Azure cloud computing resources. In October 2025, OpenAI conducted a $6.6 billion share sale that valued the company at $500 billion. In 2023 and 2024, OpenAI faced multiple lawsuits for alleged copyright infringement against authors and media companies whose work was used to train some of OpenAI's products. In November 2023, OpenAI's board removed Sam Altman as CEO, citing a lack of confidence in him, but reinstated him five days later following a reconstruction of the board. Throughout 2024, roughly half of then-employed AI safety researchers left OpenAI, citing the company's deprioritization of safety goals.
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Who Founded OpenAI?
Samuel Harris Altman (born April 22, 1985) is an American entrepreneur and investor who has been the chief executive officer (CEO) of the artificial intelligence company OpenAI since 2019. Altman attended Stanford University for two years before he dropped out and co-founded Loopt, a geosocial networking application for smartphones. Loopt was acquired by Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million in March 2012. In 2011, Altman joined Y Combinator, a technology startup accelerator and venture capital firm, and was the company's president from 2014 to 2019. He is a billionaire, due to investments in over 400 companies including Reddit, Worldcoin, Helion Energy and Instacart. Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and became its CEO in 2019, a role that made him a prominent figure of the AI boom. He supervised the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. In 2023, he was ousted by the organization's board of directors for not being "consistently candid". The move was met with significant backlash from employees and investors, resulting in Altman's reinstatement five days later and the formation of a new board.
Ilya Sutskever (Hebrew: איליה סוצקבר; born 1986) is a Soviet-born Israeli-Canadian computer scientist who specializes in machine learning. He has made several major contributions to the field of deep learning, including sequence-to-sequence learning, reasoning models, GPT models, and contributions to CLIP, DALL-E, and AlphaGo. With Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, he co-created AlexNet, a convolutional neural network. One of the most highly cited computer scientists in history, he has won the NeurIPS Test of Time Award for his lasting impact on AI research three times in a row (2022–2024) and received the National Academy of Sciences Award for the Industrial Application of Science in 2026. Sutskever co-founded OpenAI, where he served as chief scientist, overseeing the research breakthroughs that led to large language models and the launch of ChatGPT. He also led the research that led to reasoning models such as o1. In 2023, he was one of the members of OpenAI's board that ousted Sam Altman as its CEO; Altman was reinstated a week later, and Sutskever stepped down from the board. In June 2024, Sutskever co-founded the company Safe Superintelligence Inc., alongside Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy. Within a year, the company was valued at more than $30 billion.
Frequently Asked Questions about OpenAI
Who runs OpenAI?
Leadership and ownership at OpenAI has evolved over its history. It was originally founded by Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever, who established the vision for the company.
Who is responsible for OpenAI?
The founders, Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever, were responsible for the initial creation and early success of OpenAI.