OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company based in San Francisco, best known for developing the GPT family of large language models and the ChatGPT consumer assistant. Originally founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab, the organization restructured around a capped-profit and later public-benefit corporation model to support the capital requirements of frontier AI development while maintaining its stated mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence benefits humanity broadly. OpenAI's products span consumer, developer, and enterprise markets, including its API platform used by thousands of businesses to build AI-powered applications.
Microsoft has been OpenAI's largest strategic investor and cloud partner since 2019, a relationship that has evolved substantially as OpenAI has scaled its own compute infrastructure investments. The company has continued to raise substantial capital across multiple funding rounds to fund the compute costs of training and serving its models.