OpenAI

Overview

OpenAI is generally considered the most influential company at the forefront of the artificial intelligence boom. Led by CEO Sam Altman, it burst into the public consciousness in late 2022 with the release of ChatGPT. By February 2023, it had become the fastest-growing consumer app in history with a reported 100 million monthly active users.

The company was conceived as a nonprofit that would counter Google in the race to achieve systems with human-level cognition. However, three years after it launched in 2015—amid rising computing costs and a loss of funding from Elon Musk—it adopted a structure in which the original nonprofit oversaw a for-profit arm.

A tumultuous four-day span in 2023 saw the nonprofit board fire and reinstate Altman for alleged clashes between their altruistic philosophy and his vision for artificial general intelligence. Since then, he has led OpenAI to launch versions of generative image and video tools and its version of the App Store, which provides GPT agents.

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