ChatGPT / OpenAI

OpenAI was founded in December 2015 as a non-profit AI research laboratory, backed by an initial commitment of up to $1 billion from a group that included Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman. The organization's stated goal was to ensure artificial general intelligence benefited all of humanity. After Elon Musk departed the board in February 2018, OpenAI restructured in March 2019 into a "capped-profit" entity -- OpenAI LP -- where investor returns are capped at 100x their investment. That same month, Microsoft made its first $1 billion investment, beginning a partnership that would eventually reshape enterprise software.

ChatGPT launched on November 30, 2022 -- built on a GPT-3.5 foundation fine-tuned with reinforcement learning from human feedback. It reached one million users in five days, a record at the time for any consumer technology product. The launch was a cultural inflection point: within weeks, it was used in 161 countries, spawned regulatory responses across Europe, and prompted every major technology company to accelerate or announce AI product roadmaps. Microsoft deepened its commitment with a $10 billion follow-on investment in January 2023. GPT-4, a substantially more capable multimodal model, followed in March 2023. A board crisis in November 2023 -- when Sam Altman was briefly fired then reinstated within days after a near-total employee revolt -- underscored the tensions between OpenAI's non-profit origins and its commercial trajectory.

Today, OpenAI operates as a for-profit Public Benefit Corporation following its April 2026 conversion, supported by a $40 billion fundraise at a $300 billion valuation. The product lineup spans a free-tier chatbot available to anyone, professional and enterprise plans, an API used by hundreds of thousands of developers, and a growing family of reasoning-specialized models. With 600 million registered users and over 400 million weekly active users as of early 2025, ChatGPT has become the reference point against which all other AI assistants are measured.