Public domain ↗
OpenAI, Founded as a Nonprofit
- Year
- 2015
- Creator
- Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, and other founders
- Company
- OpenAI
- Location
- San Francisco, California
- Room
- The Machine ↗
Description
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research lab in San Francisco that its founders announced on December 11, 2015. It started as a nonprofit, and its backers said that they had committed $1 billion to it.
Importance
OpenAI later used the Transformer design from the Google paper in this room to make its GPT models and ChatGPT. The lab also changed its legal form several times. It added a capped-profit company in 2019 and made its business a public benefit corporation in October 2025.
Interesting fact
OpenAI later said that Greg Brockman and Sam Altman first planned to raise $100 million, but Elon Musk asked for a $1 billion figure.
Sources
- Introducing OpenAI ↗OpenAI · 2015-12-11
- OpenAI and Elon Musk ↗OpenAI · 2024-03-05
- OpenAI shifts from nonprofit to 'capped-profit' to attract capital ↗TechCrunch · 2019-03-11
- The next chapter of the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership ↗Official Microsoft Blog · 2025-10-28
- NVIDIA Delivers DGX-1 Supercomputer in a Box to OpenAI ↗TOP500 · 2016-08