OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
Editorial Standards
These company pages are for readers comparing major AI labs, tracking product strategy, and understanding how research milestones connect to real-world tools and industry influence.
We summarize each company through milestones, products, research areas, and ecosystem impact so the page reflects both what the company builds and why it matters to learners and evaluators.
Last reviewed on March 18, 2026. We refresh timelines and summaries when a company reaches a notable milestone, launches a flagship product, or changes its strategic focus.
Coverage emphasizes notable releases, research significance, product breadth, developer ecosystem relevance, and the company's broader effect on AI adoption and standards.
History
Track the evolution of OpenAI's AI technologies and key milestones.
OpenAI released GPT-4o, a multimodal model with significantly improved speed, cost efficiency, and capabilities across text, vision, and audio.
OpenAI unveiled Sora, a text-to-video model capable of generating realistic and imaginative scenes from text prompts, demonstrating significant advancements in video generation technology.
OpenAI released GPT-4, a large multimodal model that can accept image and text inputs and produce text outputs, demonstrating human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks.
OpenAI launched ChatGPT, an interactive conversational model based on GPT-3.5, which quickly became one of the fastest-growing consumer applications in history, reaching 100 million users within two months.
OpenAI announced DALL-E 2, a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from natural language descriptions, with improved resolution and accuracy compared to the original DALL-E.
OpenAI released Codex, a model that translates natural language to code, powering GitHub Copilot and capable of interpreting simple commands in natural language and executing them.
OpenAI introduced DALL-E, a neural network that creates images from text captions, demonstrating the ability to combine concepts, attributes, and styles in creative ways.
OpenAI published the paper introducing GPT-3, a 175-billion parameter language model that demonstrated remarkable few-shot learning capabilities across a wide range of tasks.
OpenAI transitioned from a non-profit to a 'capped-profit' company called OpenAI LP, with the goal of raising capital while still serving its mission.
OpenAI announced GPT-2, a 1.5-billion parameter language model capable of generating coherent paragraphs of text, but initially withheld the full model due to concerns about potential misuse.
OpenAI introduced OpenAI Five, a team of five neural networks that learned to play the complex game Dota 2 through self-play and eventually competed against professional human players.
OpenAI was founded as a non-profit artificial intelligence research company by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba, with the goal of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
