OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) organization consisting of the non-profit OpenAI, Inc. registered in Delaware and its for-profit subsidiary corporation OpenAI Global, LLC. OpenAI researches artificial intelligence with the declared intention of developing "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence, which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work".

OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Jessica Livingston, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk serving as the initial board members. Microsoft provided OpenAI Global LLC with a $1 billion investment in 2019 and a $10 billion investment in 2023.

In December 2015, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research announced the formation of OpenAI and pledged over $1 billion to the venture. The actually collected total amount of contributions was only 130 million until 2019.[5] The organization stated it would "freely collaborate" with other institutions and researchers by making its patents and research open to the public. OpenAI is headquartered at the Pioneer Building in Mission District, San Francisco.

According to Wired, Brockman met with Yoshua Bengio, one of the "founding fathers" of deep learning, and drew up a list of the "best researchers in the field". Brockman was able to hire nine of them as the first employees in December 2015. In 2016, OpenAI paid corporate-level (rather than nonprofit-level) salaries, but did not pay AI researchers salaries comparable to those of Facebook or Google.

Microsoft's Peter Lee stated that the cost of a top AI researcher exceeds the cost of a top NFL quarterback prospect. 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."Brockman stated that "the best thing that I could imagine doing was moving humanity closer to building real AI in a safe way." 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.[18] 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.[19][20] 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.In 2017 OpenAI spent $7.9 million, or a quarter of its functional expenses, on cloud computing alone.In comparison, DeepMind's total expenses in 2017 were $442 million. In the summer of 2018, simply training OpenAI's Dota 2 bots required renting 128,000 CPUs and 256 GPUs from Google for multiple weeks.

In 2018, Musk resigned from his board seat, citing "a potential future conflict [of interest]" with his role as CEO of Tesla due to Tesla's AI development for self-driving cars.Sam Altman claims that Musk believed OpenAI had fallen behind other players like Google and Musk proposed instead to take over OpenAI himself, which the board rejected. Musk subsequently left OpenAI but claimed to remain a donor, yet made no donations after his departure.

In February 2019, GPT-2 was announced, which got a lot of attention for its ability to generate human-like text.