OpenAI

OrganizationAI CompanyResearch Lab
Suggest Edit
OpenAI
TypeAI Research Company
Founded2015
FoundersSam Altman, Elon Musk, and others
HeadquartersSan Francisco, CA
Key ProductGPT series, ChatGPT

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company founded in 2015. Originally a nonprofit, it transitioned to a "capped-profit" structure in 2019. OpenAI created ChatGPT and the GPT series of language models, pioneering many techniques in RLHF and alignment.

Overview

OpenAI's stated mission is to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The company has been central to developing and popularizing large language models, and many current AI safety researchers began their careers there, including the founders of Anthropic.

Safety Research

Superalignment Team

OpenAI established a Superalignment team to work on aligning superintelligent AI systems, led initially by Jan Leike and Ilya Sutskever. The team focused on scalable oversight and eliciting latent knowledge.

Red Teaming

OpenAI pioneered adversarial testing and red teaming for AI systems, developing frameworks for identifying potential misuse and harmful capabilities before deployment.

Key Contributions

  • GPT series (GPT-2, GPT-3, GPT-4, GPT-4o)
  • ChatGPT - widely adopted conversational AI
  • InstructGPT paper on RLHF
  • DALL-E image generation
  • Codex and GitHub Copilot

Notable Alumni

See Also

External Sources

Last updated: November 28, 2025