OpenAI
openai.comFounding Story
OpenAI was founded in December 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, and others. Initially a non-profit, its mission was to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. It later transitioned to a capped-profit structure to raise the capital required for massive compute resources.
Key Milestones
OpenAI was founded in 2015 in Delaware as a nonprofit.
In April 2016, OpenAI released a public beta of "OpenAI Gym", its platform for reinforcement learning research.
In 2017, OpenAI spent $7.9 million, a quarter of its functional expenses, on cloud computing alone.
In 2018, Musk resigned from his Board of Directors seat, citing "a potential future conflict [of interest]" with his role as CEO of Tesla due to Tesla's AI development for self-driving cars.
In 2019, OpenAI transitioned from nonprofit to "capped" for-profit, with the profit being capped at 100 times any investment.
In 2020, OpenAI announced GPT-3, a language model trained on large internet datasets.
OpenAI began sending snippets of data to Sama as early as November 2021.
Its release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has been credited with catalyzing the AI boom, and widespread interest in generative AI.
Funding History
| Date | Round | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| 2015 | Seed | $1B |
| 2019 | Corporate Round | $1B |
| 2023 | Corporate Round | $10B |