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OpenAI

Artificial intelligence research and deploymentFounded 2015
Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya
Company data updated: October 2026

Founders

Who Founded OpenAI?

Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever · Founded 2015 · HQ today: San Francisco, California, United States

Who founded OpenAI?

OpenAI was founded by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever in 2015 in San Francisco, California, United States. It is now led by Sam Altman.

Founders
Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever
Founded
2015
Headquarters
San Francisco, California, United States
Number of founders
4
Current CEO
Sam Altman (since 2019)
Where was OpenAI founded?
OpenAI was founded in San Francisco, California, United States in 2015. wikidata.org
When was OpenAI founded?
OpenAI was founded in 2015.
Who started OpenAI?
OpenAI was founded by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever.
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.

Sam Altman

Co-founder 2015

Background

Sam Altman was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1985 and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended Stanford University to study computer science before dropping out in 2005 to co-found Loopt, a location-sharing social network that was later acquired by Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million. After Loopt, Altman became a partner at Y Combinator in 2011 and rose to become its president in 2014, a position that gave him visibility into hundreds of startups annually and a network spanning virtually every major venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. Altman stepped down from Y Combinator to become OpenAI's CEO full-time in 2019.

Role at OpenAI

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

Co-founder 2015

Background

Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as part of a broader effort to ensure that advanced AI development was not concentrated solely within profit-driven corporations. At the time of OpenAI's founding Musk was already CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and was among the most publicly vocal advocates for AI safety, famously calling artificial intelligence humanity's greatest existential risk and comparing AI development to 'summoning the demon.' He pledged $100 million to OpenAI's initial capitalization and served as a board co-chair until his resignation in February 2018 which was attributed publicly to potential conflicts of interest with Tesla's autonomous vehicle AI work.

Role at OpenAI

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

Co-founder 2015

Background

Greg Brockman studied mathematics at Harvard and MIT before dropping out to join Stripe, where he eventually became the company's Chief Technology Officer. He left Stripe in 2015 to co-found OpenAI alongside Altman, Musk, and Sutskever, becoming the company's President and Chairman. Brockman was instrumental in establishing OpenAI's engineering culture and technical infrastructure in its early years and was a central figure in the events surrounding the November 2023 board crisis, during which he briefly resigned before returning alongside Altman.

Role at OpenAI

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

Co-founder 2015

Background

Ilya Sutskever was born in Russia and grew up in Israel before completing his PhD under Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto, where he co-authored the AlexNet paper in 2012 that demonstrated the superiority of deep convolutional neural networks for image recognition and is widely credited with igniting the modern deep learning era. He joined Google Brain after completing his doctorate and became one of the most respected AI researchers in the world before leaving to co-found OpenAI in 2015 as Chief Scientist.

Role at OpenAI

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.

OpenAI: CEO & Leadership History

Full timeline →

Fidji Simo

CEO of Applications (former)

2025 – 2026

She provides critical governance and strategic guidance as OpenAI attempts to pivot into consumer hardware and highly monetized SaaS products.

Vijaye Raji

CTO of Applications

2025 – Present

Statsig founder who joined via the 2025 acquisition to head product engineering for ChatGPT and Codex.

Emmett Shear

Chief Executive Officer

2023 – 2023

Emmett Shear served as chief executive of OpenAI from 2023 to 2023.

Sam Altman

Chief Executive Officer

2019 – Present

Co-founder and CEO who turned OpenAI from a research lab into a consumer and enterprise platform; briefly removed by the board in November 2023 and reinstated days later.

Mira Murati

Chief Technology Officer and interim CEO (former)

2018 – 2024

As CTO, she was the public face of the engineering organization during the chaotic November 2023 board crisis before eventually departing the company in late 2024.

Greg Brockman

President and Co-founder

2015 – Present

As President, he directly oversaw the engineering teams responsible for training GPT-4, establishing OpenAI's undisputed early dominance in the LLM market.

Keep researching OpenAI

Who Founded OpenAI? FAQ

Who were the original founders and financial benefactors of OpenAI in December 2015?

OpenAI was founded in December 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman, with $1 billion in founding pledges from Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Who is Ilya Sutskever and what was his foundational role as Chief Scientist?

Dr. Ilya Sutskever is a world-renowned pioneer in deep learning and student of Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto. As OpenAI's founding Chief Scientist, Sutskever was the intellectual behind sequence-to-sequence learning, the scaling laws of large language models, and the creation of GPT-1, GPT-2, GPT-3, and GPT-4.

Why did Elon Musk depart OpenAI in 2018?

Elon Musk stepped down from OpenAI's board of directors in February 2018 due to potential future conflicts of interest with Tesla's autonomous driving AI development, and after his proposal to take full operational control and merge OpenAI into Tesla was rejected by the other co-founders.

What was the founding insight behind the 'Scaling Hypothesis' in deep learning?

Co-founders Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman championed the 'Scaling Hypothesis', the radical conviction that scaling up autoregressive transformer models with large compute clusters and internet-scale datasets would lead to emergent general intelligence, a belief that proved correct with the breakthrough performance of GPT-3 and GPT-4.

How did the 2017 Google 'Attention Is All You Need' paper shape OpenAI's roadmap?

When Google researchers published the major Transformer architecture paper in 2017, OpenAI scientists (led by Alec Radford) immediately recognized that transformers could be scaled autoregressively to predict the next word in a sequence, leading to the creation of GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) in 2018.

What was the landmark release of GPT-2 in 2019 and the 'staged release' safety debate?

In February 2019, OpenAI created GPT-2 (1.5 billion parameters), demonstrating fluent, coherent paragraph generation; concerned about potential misuse for automated disinformation campaigns, OpenAI initially withheld the full model weights, pioneering the practice of phased safety evaluations.

How did the founders invent Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)?

OpenAI researchers (led by Paul Christiano and John Schulman) developed Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), training models to align with human preferences using reward modeling, which transformed raw, hallucination-prone base models into polite, helpful, and safe assistants like InstructGPT and ChatGPT.

What enduring charter was established by the founders in 2018?

The OpenAI Charter codified the institution's primary fiduciary duty: to ensure that Artificial General Intelligence is safe and that its economic benefits are broadly distributed, committing to assist other value-aligned safety projects rather than competing in a dangerous final race to AGI.

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Content is for informational purposes only. Not financial advice. Data sourced from SEC filings, annual reports, and public records. See our full disclaimer and methodology.