OpenAI, Inc. (legal name: OpenAI OpCo, LLC) is an American company specializing in artificial intelligence research, founded in December 2015 by a group of enthusiasts led by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Greg Brockman.
OpenAI gained global recognition through its series of research breakthroughs and developments in large language models. Its first major success came in 2018 with the publication of the paper on GPT-1, which established the paradigm of pre-training language models and demonstrated the effectiveness of the decoder-only approach. In 2019, GPT-2 showcased the feasibility of scaling up to 1.5 billion parameters and performing tasks without explicit fine-tuning (zero-shot learning). In 2020, GPT-3, with 175 billion parameters, demonstrated unprecedented few-shot learning capabilities. However, the company achieved worldwide fame following the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. While certainly not the first AI-powered conversational assistant, ChatGPT was the first mass-market product to make such chatbots genuinely useful and accessible to a broad audience, sparking unprecedented global interest in generative AI. Concurrently, in 2022, the company introduced Whisper — a speech recognition model with open weights. In 2025, OpenAI took a significant step toward openness by releasing the GPT-OSS family of open-source language models (20B and 120B parameters), specifically designed for reasoning and agentic scenarios. It is also worth noting that the openai Python library (and libraries for other programming languages) has become the de facto standard for interacting with language models.
Although most of OpenAI’s flagship models remain proprietary, the company plays a vital role in the open-model ecosystem. Whisper, released with open weights under the MIT license, has become the de facto standard for speech recognition tasks within the research community and is widely adopted in various applications. Models GPT-OSS-20B and GPT-OSS-120B have firmly established themselves among the most popular models among users within just one month of their release.
OpenAI occupies a unique position in the artificial intelligence industry as a company that not only advances cutting-edge research but also successfully commercializes it while making its technologies accessible to the mass audience.