Organisation · lab · US

OpenAI

The lab that built the GPT models and ChatGPT and set off the commercial AI race; still among the most-used and most-valuable AI companies in the world.

386 entries · January 2020 – August 2026

OpenAI is the San Francisco AI lab, founded in 2015, that builds the GPT models and ChatGPT. Its launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 brought conversational AI to a mass audience and set off the commercial race that has defined the field since, and for roughly two years GPT-4 was the model competitors were measured against. Founded as a non-profit, it has repeatedly reshaped itself to raise the tens of billions that frontier models require, completing a contested restructuring in October 2025 that placed a new public-benefit corporation under a controlling foundation while leaving Microsoft with a stake of about 27%. By 2026 it was among the most valuable private companies in the world, though its governance — underlined by the board's brief removal of chief executive Sam Altman in 2023 — remained a subject of dispute.

Category
Frontier & foundation-model labs
Founded
2015
HQ
San Francisco, US
Funding
~$500bn valuation (2025); backed by Microsoft and SoftBank

Tracks

  • Models & capabilities 114
  • Safety & alignment 89
  • Money & business 71
  • Courts & copyright 44
  • Labs & people 43
  • Security & misuse 40
  • Benchmarks & progress 38
  • Culture & impact 37
  • Government & policy 33
  • Compute & infrastructure 24
  • Ideas & essays 22
  • Open weights & ecosystem 11

Also mentioned in 204 entries

Referenced in passing — OpenAI isn't the main subject of these.