OpenAI
Company History
OpenAI History: Founding, Growth & Key Milestones
Founded 2015 in San Francisco, California, United States
When was OpenAI founded?
OpenAI was founded in 2015 in San Francisco, California, United States by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, making it 11 years old.
- Founded
- 2015
- Founding place
- San Francisco, California, United States
- Founders
- Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever
- Headquarters today
- San Francisco, California, United States
- Milestones documented
- 12 (2015–2026)
- Current CEO
- Sam Altman
- Acquisitions
- 4
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2015 | OpenAI founded as a nonprofit |
| 2018 | Mira Murati Joins OpenAI |
| 2019 | Capped-profit entity and Microsoft deal |
| 2020 | GPT-3 Released |
| 2022 | ChatGPT launch |
| 2023 | Board crisis |
| 2023 | GPT-4 Released |
| 2025 | Acquired Jony Ive's io |
| 2025 | Recapitalization into OpenAI Group PBC |
| 2025 | Fidji Simo Becomes CEO of Applications |
| 2026 | $122B funding round |
| 2026 | Run rate nears $70B |
- Where was OpenAI founded?
- OpenAI was founded in San Francisco, California, United States in 2015. wikidata.org
- Who founded OpenAI?
- OpenAI was founded by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever.
- When did OpenAI start?
- OpenAI was founded in 2015.
- How old is OpenAI?
- OpenAI is 11 years old as of 2026.
Founding Story
OpenAI was announced in December 2015 as a nonprofit research lab backed by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, John Schulman and others, partly as a counterweight to Google's lead after it bought DeepMind. Musk left the board in 2018. Needing far more capital for compute, OpenAI created a capped-profit subsidiary in 2019 and took a $1 billion investment from Microsoft. In October 2025 it completed a recapitalization into OpenAI Group PBC, still controlled by the nonprofit, now called the OpenAI Foundation.
Founders
Sam Altman
Sam Altman co-chaired OpenAI at its 2015 founding and became CEO in 2019. He negotiated the Microsoft partnership, oversaw the ChatGPT launch in 2022, survived the board's brief attempt to remove him in November 2023, and led the October 2025 recapitalization and the $122 billion round that valued OpenAI at $852 billion in March 2026. Education: John Burroughs School. Sam Altman was born in 1985.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk was an early co-chair and funder of OpenAI and left its board in February 2018. He later founded rival xAI in 2023 and sued OpenAI, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2024, arguing the company abandoned its nonprofit mission. OpenAI disputes the claims and published emails showing Musk had sought control of the lab; the dispute continued into 2026. Elon Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria. Education: Smith School of Business; University of Pennsylvania.
Greg Brockman
Greg Brockman left his role as Stripe CTO to co-found OpenAI in 2015 and serves as president. He briefly quit during the November 2023 board crisis, returned with Altman, took a sabbatical in 2024 and came back later that year to focus on technical work and large-scale compute. Greg Brockman was born in 1987 in Thompson. Education: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Red River High School.
Ilya Sutskever
Ilya Sutskever was OpenAI's chief scientist from 2015 to May 2024, overseeing work behind the GPT series and ChatGPT. He voted to remove Sam Altman in November 2023, then said he regretted it. After leaving OpenAI he co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy. Ilya Sutskever was born in 1986 in Nizhny Novgorod. Education: Stanford University; Open University of Israel.
Key Milestones
OpenAI founded as a nonprofit
OpenAI launched in December 2015 as a nonprofit AI research lab.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgMira Murati Joins OpenAI
Mira Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 and became chief technology officer in 2022. She served as interim CEO for two days in November 2023 and left OpenAI in 2024.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgCapped-profit entity and Microsoft deal
OpenAI created a capped-profit subsidiary and received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgChatGPT launch
ChatGPT launched on November 30, 2022 and reached 100 million users faster than any prior consumer app.
Source: openai.comBoard crisis
The nonprofit board removed Sam Altman in November 2023; he returned as CEO within days and the board was rebuilt.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgAcquired Jony Ive's io
OpenAI agreed to buy hardware startup io for just under $6.5 billion in an all-equity deal.
Source: npr.orgRecapitalization into OpenAI Group PBC
In October 2025 the for-profit became a public benefit corporation controlled by the OpenAI Foundation; Microsoft received about 27%.
Source: blogs.microsoft.comFidji Simo Becomes CEO of Applications
Fidji Simo, the former Instacart chief executive, became CEO of Applications at OpenAI in 2025, running ChatGPT and other applications under Sam Altman. She stepped down from the full-time role in July 2026 for health reasons and stayed on as an adviser.
Source: finance.yahoo.com$122B funding round
OpenAI closed $122 billion in committed capital at an $852 billion post-money valuation on March 31, 2026.
Source: openai.comRun rate nears $70B
Axios reported in September 2026 that annual recurring revenue was nearing $70 billion.
Source: axios.comMajor Acquisitions
Global Illumination
2023Digital product studio founded by former Instagram and YouTube designers; OpenAI's first public acquisition.
Rockset
2024Real-time analytics and search database used to strengthen retrieval for enterprise products.
io Products
2025AI hardware startup co-founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive.
Statsig
2025Product experimentation platform.
Keep researching OpenAI
OpenAI Company History FAQ
What are the historic milestones that define the evolution of OpenAI?
Key milestones include: founding as a non-profit (Dec 2015), release of Gym and Universe (2016), GPT-1 paper (2018), creation of capped-profit entity and $1B Microsoft partnership (2019), release of GPT-3 (2020), launch of DALL-E (2021), launch of ChatGPT (Nov 2022), release of GPT-4 (March 2023), boardroom firing and reinstatement of Sam Altman (Nov 2023), launch of Sora video model (Feb 2024), release of GPT-4o (May 2024), debut of o1 reasoning models (Sept 2024), and $6.6B funding at $157B valuation (Oct 2024).
How did OpenAI Five defeat the world champion esports team in Dota 2 in 2019?
In April 2019, OpenAI Five (a team of five neural networks trained through deep reinforcement learning playing 180 years of games against itself daily) defeated the reigning world champion esports team OG in Dota 2, demonstrating that AI could master long-horizon continuous strategy and complex team coordination.
When did OpenAI launch GPT-3 and how did it inaugurate the modern LLM era?
In June 2020, OpenAI published 'Language Models are Few-Shot Learners' introducing GPT-3 (175 billion parameters), proving that a single large model could write code, translate languages, draft poetry, and answer questions with zero task-specific fine-tuning.
How did DALL-E ignite the AI visual creative revolution in 2021-2022?
In January 2021, OpenAI introduced DALL-E (generating images from text captions like 'an armchair in the shape of an avocado'), followed by DALL-E 2 in 2022 and DALL-E 3 in 2023, pioneering the modern generative AI digital art and visual media industry.
What was the significance of the GPT-4 launch in March 2023?
Released on March 14, 2023, GPT-4 was OpenAI's first large multimodal model accepting text and image inputs, achieving top 10% percentile scores on the Uniform Bar Exam and US Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE), setting a new global benchmark for machine intelligence.
How did OpenAI handle the launch of GPT-4o in May 2024?
In May 2024, OpenAI released GPT-4o ('omni'), integrating text, vision, and audio natively into a single model with real-time conversational voice capabilities, making human-level multimodal AI accessible for free to hundreds of millions of users.
When was the OpenAI o1 reasoning model introduced?
On September 12, 2024, OpenAI introduced the OpenAI o1 series, the world's first frontier model trained to generate complex chains-of-thought before responding, achieving historic breakthrough scores in competitive mathematics (AIME), code generation, and physics.
What is OpenAI's ultimate mission for the future of Artificial General Intelligence?
OpenAI's ultimate mission is to build safe, highly autonomous Artificial General Intelligence that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work, ensuring that this transformative power elevates human potential, solves existential scientific challenges, and enriches all of humanity.
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