It aims to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work".

A total of $1 billion in capital was pledged by Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research.

[45] Altman has stated that even a billion dollars may turn out to be insufficient, and that the lab may ultimately need "more capital than any non-profit has ever raised" to achieve artificial general intelligence.

[49] In 2021, OpenAI introduced DALL-E, a specialized deep learning model adept at generating complex digital images from textual descriptions, utilizing a variant of the GPT-3 architecture.

[70] On November 6, 2023, OpenAI launched GPTs, allowing individuals to create customized versions of ChatGPT for specific purposes, further expanding the possibilities of AI applications across various industries.

"[94] A group of nine current and former OpenAI employees has accused the company of prioritizing profits over safety, using restrictive agreements to silence concerns, and moving too quickly with inadequate risk management.

[108] Also in October 2024, The Intercept revealed that OpenAI's tools were considered "essential" for AFRICOM's mission and included in an "Exception to Fair Opportunity" contractual agreement between the Department of Defense and Microsoft.

On January 21, 2025, it was announced that OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank and MGX would launch The Stargate Project, a joint venture to build an AI infrastructure system in conjunction with the US government.

[122] On February 10, a consortium of investors led by Elon Musk submitted a $97.4 billion unsolicited bid to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI and was willing to match or exceed any better offers.

[126] OpenAI began collaborating with Broadcom in 2024 to design a custom AI chip capable of both training and inference targeted for mass production in 2026 and to be manufactured by TSMC in 3 nm node.

Sources:[10][134] Some scientists, such as Stephen Hawking and Stuart Russell, have articulated concerns that if advanced AI gains the ability to redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate, an unstoppable "intelligence explosion" could lead to human extinction.

[144] In 2024, following the temporary removal of Sam Altman and his return, many employees gradually left OpenAI, including most of the original leadership team and a significant number of AI safety researchers.

[154] OpenAI Five is a team of five OpenAI-curated bots used in the competitive five-on-five video game Dota 2, that learn to play against human players at a high skill level entirely through trial-and-error algorithms.

Before becoming a team of five, the first public demonstration occurred at The International 2017, the annual premiere championship tournament for the game, where Dendi, a professional Ukrainian player, lost against a bot in a live one-on-one matchup.

[178] The original paper on generative pre-training of a transformer-based language model was written by Alec Radford and his colleagues, and published in preprint on OpenAI's website on June 11, 2018.

[179] It showed how a generative model of language could acquire world knowledge and process long-range dependencies by pre-training on a diverse corpus with long stretches of contiguous text.

[181] Other researchers, such as Jeremy Howard, warned of "the technology to totally fill Twitter, email, and the web up with reasonable-sounding, context-appropriate prose, which would drown out all other speech and be impossible to filter".

[190] Like its predecessor,[180] the GPT-3 trained model was not immediately released to the public for concerns of possible abuse, although OpenAI planned to allow access through a paid cloud API after a two-month free private beta that began in June 2020.

[224] DALL-E uses a 12-billion-parameter version of GPT-3 to interpret natural language inputs (such as "a green leather purse shaped like a pentagon" or "an isometric view of a sad capybara") and generate corresponding images.

[232] Will Douglas Heaven of the MIT Technology Review called the demonstration videos "impressive", but noted that they must have been cherry-picked and might not represent Sora's typical output.

In an interview, actor/filmmaker Tyler Perry expressed his astonishment at the technology's ability to generate realistic video from text descriptions, citing its potential to revolutionize storytelling and content creation.

[247] Launched in November 2022, ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence tool built on top of GPT-3 that provides a conversational interface that allows users to ask questions in natural language.

[270] On November 17, 2023, Sam Altman was removed as CEO when its board of directors (composed of Helen Toner, Ilya Sutskever, Adam D'Angelo and Tasha McCauley) cited a lack of confidence in him.

[282] About 738 of OpenAI's 770 employees, including Murati and Sutskever, signed an open letter stating they would quit their jobs and join Microsoft if the board did not rehire Altman and then resign.

On November 21, 2023, after continued negotiations, Altman and Brockman returned to the company in their prior roles along with a reconstructed board made up of new members Bret Taylor (as chairman) and Lawrence Summers, with D'Angelo remaining.

[287] On November 22, 2023, emerging reports suggested that Sam Altman's dismissal from OpenAI may have been linked to his alleged mishandling of a significant breakthrough in the organization's secretive project codenamed Q*.

[294] In March 2023, the company was also criticized for disclosing particularly few technical details about products like GPT-4, contradicting its initial commitment to openness and making it harder for independent researchers to replicate its work and develop safeguards.

[317] In October 2024, The Intercept revealed that OpenAI's tools are considered "essential" for AFRICOM's mission and included in an "Exception to Fair Opportunity" contractural agreement between the United States Department of Defense and Microsoft.

[319] They also claimed that OpenAI and its partner as well as customer Microsoft continued to unlawfully collect and use personal data from millions of consumers worldwide to train artificial intelligence models.

[325][326] As of January 17, 2025, the family's allegations have gained widespread attention, with figures like Elon Musk and Silicon Valley Congressman Ro Khanna publicly calling for further investigation into the possibility of foul play.