OpenAI

The AI company behind ChatGPT, GPT models and the OpenAI API, founded in San Francisco in 2015 with the mission of making sure AGI benefits all of humanity.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is the AI company behind ChatGPT, the chatbot that brought AI into everyday life for millions of people. It builds large AI models, including the GPT family for text, DALL-E for images and Codex for writing software, and offers them to the public through ChatGPT and to developers and businesses through its API. It also carries out research on how to make advanced AI safe and useful.

OpenAI was founded in December 2015 in San Francisco as a non-profit research lab. Its founders included Sam Altman, now its chief executive, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever and Elon Musk, who left the board in 2018. In 2019 it created a for-profit arm to raise the money that very large AI models need. Its website now describes a structure where a non-profit, the OpenAI Foundation, governs a public benefit corporation, OpenAI Group, which runs the business.

The mission, in OpenAI's words, is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. It defines artificial general intelligence, or AGI, as AI systems that are generally smarter than humans. OpenAI says it is working to build safe and beneficial AGI, and that it would count its mission as fulfilled if its work helps others reach that outcome too. Safety is a large part of its public work, including how it tests and deploys its models and how it protects security and privacy.

Its best-known products are ChatGPT, which launched at the end of 2022, and GPT-4, released in March 2023. Today it offers ChatGPT for individuals, schools and businesses, Codex for programming, image and video generation, and a developer platform with the API and tools for building apps on top of its models.

On its website, OpenAI says that building safe and beneficial AI needs people from many disciplines and backgrounds, and it invites applications through its careers pages. Its headquarters are in San Francisco, and the pages we read do not list its offices or any UK location, nor do they describe a student scheme, so students should check the careers page for live roles and locations.

What they do

• {'desc': 'The AI assistant used by individuals, schools and businesses.', 'title': 'ChatGPT'}
• {'desc': "Tools for building apps and products on OpenAI's models.", 'title': 'API and developer platform'}
• {'desc': 'AI that helps write, test and fix software.', 'title': 'Codex'}
• {'desc': 'Models that create pictures and video from text.', 'title': 'Image and video generation'}
• {'desc': 'Work on testing, deploying and governing advanced AI safely.', 'title': 'Safety and policy research'}

Key facts

• Founded: San Francisco, December 2015
• Headquarters: San Francisco, USA
• Founders include Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever
• ChatGPT launched at the end of 2022; GPT-4 in March 2023
• Structure: a non-profit foundation governs a public benefit corporation

Website: openai.com