OpenAI Glossary

AI lab founded 2015 as a nonprofit, restructured as a capped-profit company in 2019; makers of ChatGPT and the GPT model family. The market-defining player in consumer-facing AI as of 2026.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 by a group including Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and several others, initially as a non-profit research lab with a stated mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The structure was reorganised in 2019 into a capped-profit company under the original non-profit’s governance. The lab developed the GPT series of language models (GPT-3, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GPT-5), the ChatGPT consumer product launched November 2022, the DALL-E image generators, and the Codex / Copilot coding tools (the latter via partnership with Microsoft and GitHub).

For this Dictionary, OpenAI is the market comparator — the lab that defined what an AI product was for the general public, and the one most frequently named as the alternative when readers reach for the AI experience they already know. The Dictionary’s editorial position is broadly neutral on OpenAI as a vendor; the Lab Character entry treats the lab as a worked example of an organisation whose founding mission and current commercial posture are in unresolved tension. The November 2023 governance crisis (Altman’s brief firing and reinstatement) and subsequent departures of the original safety leadership are the canonical inflection points.

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