science

OpenAI

OpenAI is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand OpenAI rather than just read about it. In short: OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. It develops proprietary generative AI models, particularly its GPT series of large language models (LLMs).

Key takeaways

OpenAI belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect OpenAI to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of OpenAI from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. It develops proprietary generative AI models, particularly its GPT series of large language models (LLMs). Its release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has been credited with catalyzing the AI boom; as of 2026 ChatGPT is the fifth-most-visited website globally. OpenAI also releases Codex, an AI coding agent, and the GPT Image models. In April 2026, OpenAI closed a funding round with a post-money valuation of $852 billion; it is the second most valuable pure play AI firm after Anthropic. OpenAI was founded in 2015 in Delaware as a nonprofit, with Elon Musk and Sam Altman as co-chairs; Musk resigned in 2018. A for-profit subsidiary was created in 2019, and a 2025 restructuring converted the subsidiary into OpenAI Group PBC, that is 26% owned by the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation. Microsoft has invested over US$13 billion into OpenAI. OpenAI partners with semiconductor firms including Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom, and cloud computing services from Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. In June 2026 it filed for an initial public offering. In 2023 and 2024, OpenAI faced multiple lawsuits for alleged copyright infringement against authors and media companies whose work was used to train some of OpenAI's products. In November 2023, OpenAI's board removed Sam Altman as CEO, citing a lack of confidence in him, but following a reconstruction of the board, it reinstated him five days later. Throughout 2024, roughly half of then-employed AI safety researchers left OpenAI, citing the company's deprioritization of safety goals. Former OpenAI personnel have founded competing AI firms Anthropic, SpaceXAI, Safe Superintelligence Inc., and Thinking Machines Lab.

Founding

In December 2015, OpenAI was founded as the nonprofit organization OpenAI, Inc., by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba, with Musk and Altman as the co-chairs. A total of $1 billion in capital was pledged by Musk, Altman, Greg Brockman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Infosys. However, the actual capital collected significantly lagged pledges. According to tax filings, only $133 million had been received by 2021. Musk stated in 2015 that he was partly motivated by concerns about AI safety and existential risk from artificial general intelligence. OpenAI stated that "it's hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society", and that it is equally difficult to comprehend "how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly". The startup also wrote that AI "should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible", and that "because of AI's surprising history, it's hard to predict when human-level AI might come within reach. When it does, it'll be important to have a leading research institution which can prioritize a good outcome for all over its own self-interest." Altman expected a decades-long project that eventually surpasses human intelligence. In its founding charter, OpenAI defined its mission as ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) "benefits all of humanity", and stated an intention to collaborate openly with other institutions by making certain patents and research publicly available, but later restricted access to its most capable models, citing competitive and safety concerns. OpenAI was initially run from Brockman's living room. In September 2016, it moved to the Pioneer Building in the Mission District, San Francisco. Brockman met with Yoshua Bengio, one of the "founding fathers" of deep learning, and drew up a list of great AI researchers. Brockman was able to hire nine of them as the first employees in December 2015. OpenAI did not pay AI researchers salaries comparable to those of Facebook or Google. It also did not pay stock options which AI researchers typically get. Nevertheless, OpenAI spent $7 million on its first 52 employees in 2016. OpenAI's potential and mission drew these researchers to the firm; a Google employee said he was willing to leave Google for OpenAI "partly because of the very strong group of people and, to a very large extent, because of its mission." OpenAI co-founder Wojciech Zaremba stated that he turned down "borderline crazy" offers of two to three times his market value to join OpenAI instead. In April 2016, OpenAI released a public beta of "OpenAI Gym", its platform for reinforcement learning research. Nvidia gifted its first DGX-1 supercomputer to OpenAI in August 2016 to help it train larger and more complex AI models with the capability of reducing processing time from six days to two hours. In December 2016, OpenAI released "Universe", a software platform for measuring and training an AI's general intelligence across the world's supply of games, websites, and other applications.

Corporate structure

Transition from nonprofit

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with OpenAI

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what OpenAI claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to OpenAI before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about OpenAI ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of OpenAI

In research: OpenAI appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses OpenAI in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: OpenAI is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 2015 establishments in California, 2015 in San Francisco, 2015 in artificial intelligence, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for OpenAI outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study OpenAI in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what OpenAI means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain OpenAI out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is OpenAI in simple terms?

Why does OpenAI matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study OpenAI?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on OpenAI.