OpenAI

OpenAI is the San Francisco lab behind ChatGPT, the GPT model family, and the o-series reasoning models. Founded as a nonprofit in 2015 and restructured around a capped-profit and later a public-benefit-corporation model, it triggered the modern AI boom with ChatGPT's launch in November 2022. It remains the most-watched company in AI, anchoring hundreds of billions of dollars in compute commitments across Microsoft, Oracle, SoftBank, and chip partners.

OpenAI was founded in December 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, and others as a nonprofit research lab dedicated to ensuring artificial general intelligence benefits humanity. It pivoted to a capped-profit structure in 2019 to raise the capital scaling required, took a landmark investment from Microsoft, and in 2025 restructured again into a public benefit corporation controlled by the OpenAI Foundation, with Microsoft holding roughly a quarter of the for-profit entity.

Its research set the template for the industry: the GPT series demonstrated that scaling transformers yields general capability, ChatGPT made that capability a consumer product with hundreds of millions of weekly users, and the o-series established test-time reasoning as a new scaling axis. The product line now spans ChatGPT, the API platform, GPT-5-era flagship models, Sora video generation, and agentic coding tools.

Strategically, OpenAI sits at the center of the AI buildout. The Stargate program with SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX targets hundreds of billions of dollars of US datacenter capacity, and 2025 brought multi-gigawatt supply agreements spanning NVIDIA, AMD, and a custom-accelerator partnership with Broadcom. Its Microsoft relationship — Azure compute, model IP rights, and deep Copilot integration — remains the most consequential partnership in the industry.