OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence research and deployment company founded in December 2015 as a nonprofit by Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, and others, with the mission to advance artificial general intelligence (AGI) in ways that benefit humanity.[1][2][3] Headquartered in San Francisco, it began with a $1 billion endowment from investors including Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services, and Infosys, enabling it to attract top talent for research in deep learning and reinforcement learning.[1][3][5] Early milestones included the 2016 release of OpenAI Gym, an open-source toolkit for reinforcement learning algorithms, and the 2018 OpenAI Five project, where AI agents mastered the complex game Dota 2 through coordinated play.[1][2][4] That year, OpenAI published a foundational paper on Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), paving the way for later models.[2][5] In 2018, Elon Musk departed due to conflicts with Tesla.[3] To scale operations, OpenAI transitioned in 2019 to a hybrid structure: a nonprofit parent (OpenAI Inc.) controlling a capped-profit subsidiary (OpenAI LP or Global LLC), prioritizing its mission over profits and retaining nonprofit oversight for AGI decisions.[1][2][6] Key achievements followed, including GPT-3 in 2020 for advanced natural language tasks, DALL-E in 2021 for text-to-image generation, Codex for code generation, and GPT-4 in 2023, which set new benchmarks in performance.[3][4][5] ChatGPT, launched in late 2022 based on GPT models, alongside tools like Whisper for speech recognition, ignited the global generative AI boom.[1] By 2025, OpenAI evolved into a public benefit corporation under the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation, balancing fundraising for ambitious projects with ethical goals.[1] Microsoft provides key infrastructure via Azure, fueling partnerships and growth.[5] OpenAI remains a leader in AI innovation, influencing ethical debates, though it faces scrutiny over safety, transparency, and rapid commercialization.[4] Its developer conference in 2023 introduced GPT-4 Turbo, custom GPTs, and a GPT Store.[3]