OpenAI marks ten years since its founding
The essay, published on the anniversary of OpenAI's December 2015 founding announcement, forecast that the company was 'almost certain' to build superintelligence within another decade.
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OpenAI published “Ten years,” a retrospective essay marking a decade since it announced its founding as a nonprofit AI research lab on 11 December 2015 — the company did not begin operating until early January 2016. The essay reflected on the distance travelled from a deeply uncertain start, through GPT-3, ChatGPT and GPT-4, to a company OpenAI itself said now had “a shot” at its original mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence benefits humanity.
Looking forward, the essay stated the company believed it was “almost certain” to build superintelligence within another decade — a claim, like OpenAI’s earlier AGI timelines, that was unverifiable at publication and consistent with the confident framing the company had used throughout 2025 to justify its scale of compute investment and fundraising.