This article introduces OpenAI and ChatGPT, who created them, and who is responsible for them today.
OpenAI is one of the latest big names to emerge from the artificial intelligence boom, with its flagship products ChatGPT, Dall-E and, most recently, Sora making waves for their advanced natural language processing and ability to bring conversations and responses to life in a realistic way.
Although the product and the company behind it have received significant outside investment, OpenAI remains the sole owner of ChatGPT.
OpenAI was originally a non-profit artificial intelligence research organization founded in 2015 by Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Jessica Livingston, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata and Wojciech Zaremba. Elon Musk and Altman serve on the original board of directors, and Musk is a major early investor in the company.
OpenAI received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft in 2019, followed by an additional $10 billion in 2023, as part of using ChatGPT to power Bing Chat and other Microsoft AI projects. Microsoft holds a non-voting seat on ChatGPT's board of directors but does not own a controlling stake in the company. The OpenAI system also runs on Microsoft's Azure supercomputing platform.
As of 2024, OpenAI's original non-profit status remains, but it has an agency subsidiary called OpenAI Global, a capped for-profit organization that operates the main ChatGPT service. This is reportedly to allow the company to receive more outside investment and distribute stock and other benefits to employees more easily to attract better candidates for key positions.
Although there was some turmoil on the OpenAI board of directors in the fall of 2023, with CEO Sam Altman being temporarily ousted, he soon returned following the loss of OpenAI employees. Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman are also part of Microsoft's advanced artificial intelligence research team, although OpenAI remains their main focus.
Although OpenAI developed many GPT language models internally as part of its AI research efforts, it did not release its first commercial ChatGPT service until December 2022. The first version of this AI chatbot is based on its GPT-3.5 language model,
OpenAI expanded the product in March 2023, launching a GPT-4 language model, but restricted its use behind the ChatGPT Plus subscription service and access to the GPT-4 API.
Microsoft then launched Copilot, a Windows chatbot and its Office applications based on OpenAI technology. Copilot does not use the ChatGPT language model.
OpenAI launched the latest version of ChatGPT in May 2024. GPT-4o introduces multimodality to AI, with a wider range of capabilities than ever before. This version is faster than its predecessor and offers more features for both free and paid users.
ChatGPT was created by OpenAI, although the concept of artificial intelligence chatbots has been around for a long time.
The original concept of natural language processing in the field of artificial intelligence dates back to the 1940s, when Alan Turing proposed a test that involved automatically interpreting and generating language that appeared natural and readable to humans.
There were token efforts to develop NLP models over the next few decades, but it was not until the combination of big data and machine learning, as well as advanced computing power, that its development really accelerated in the 2010s. This resulted in the first viable commercial product of NLM in ChatGPT.
OpenAI also supports the development and release of all new versions of ChatGPT, including the more advanced GPT-4 language model available as part of ChatGPT Plus starting in March 2023, and the latest GPT-4o language model launched in May 2024.
The company also develops DALL-E, an image-generating artificial intelligence; a speech-recognition tool called Whisper; and a music-creation algorithm called Jukebox. OpenAI has also created a team of video game bots called OpenAI Five, capable of competing against high-level professional DOTA 2 teams.
