OpenAI
OpenAI is a software development and research company, which has made significant contributions to generative AI technology. OpenAI was started as a non-profit organization, with the idea that artificial intelligence can be a power for good, or a for evil. By removing a profit incentive, the hope was that their software would not be influenced by a drive for monetary profit, thus protecting it from becoming a force for evil.[1] Therefore, OpenAI, Inc. was registered as a non-profit in the US state of Delaware. However, they needed a way to make money, so they also founded a for-profit subsidiary, OpenAI Global, LLC.
As of 2026, Sam Altman was Open AI's CEO.[2]
OpenAI has substantial backing from Microsoft, which has integrated elements for GPT-4 into Bing. Other "tech giants" are also working on their own implementations of GTP-4, or similar language-learning models. The release of GTP-4 seemed to accelerate the timetable for other such projects, including Google Bard, which was released on March 21, 2023. Bard was seen by some as more of an incomplete project at the time of release, than a polished product. However, it has improved somewhat since then.[3][4]
Elon Musk has been highly critical of OpenAI based on its political bias.
Products
The company worked for some time on their "Generative Pre-trained Transformer." The organization came into public awareness in 2023, when they released their "Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4" (GPT-4) on March 14, 2023. It was made available to the public through an easy-to-use system called ChatGPT.