OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research organization founded in 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and others, with the mission of developing safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence (AGI). The company has made major breakthroughs in AI, releasing powerful language models like GPT-3 and GPT-4 that power applications from AI writing to coding, the DALL-E 2 text-to-image model, and the highly capable ChatGPT conversational AI that has seen massive adoption.
Originally structured as a non-profit, OpenAI shifted to a "capped-profit" model in 2019 to help fund its ambitious research requiring billions in investment. Microsoft is a close partner, investing over $10 billion in OpenAI. The company has grown rapidly to around 770 employees across research, engineering, and policy as of late 2023. World-renowned AI researchers like Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman are among the co-founders.
The company's valuation has soared. However, the company faced a turbulent leadership transition in November 2023 when CEO Sam Altman was briefly removed by the board before being reinstated days later alongside co-founder Greg Brockman, after pressure from employees and investors. Former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor joined a reconstituted board as chairman.
While OpenAI aims to positively shape the trajectory of AGI, the immense power of the AI systems it is developing also poses significant risks if misused or if the technology advances faster than our ability to control it. Challenges include improving AI safety and aligning ever-more-capable AI systems with human values. Maintaining trust and support from employees, users, and society at large will be crucial as OpenAI navigates the cutting edge of AI progress. By joining OpenAI, you would have the opportunity to work on some of the most advanced AI systems in the world alongside top talent, while helping to responsibly steer the future of this transformative technology.
2015
Founded
1k+
Employees
Series F
Stage
$157B
Latest Valuation
$1B+
Total Funding
Oct 02 2024
Last Fundraise
Why is the rating
Founders

Trevor Blackwell
- CEO at Anybots, Partner at YCombinator

John Schulman
- PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley

Ilya Sutskever
- Research Scientist at Google

Sam Altman
- President of YCombinator, Loopt Cofounder

Greg Brockman
- CTO of Stripe

Elon Musk
- CEO of Tesla, Founded SpaceX, Neuralink, The Boring Company

Wojciech Zaremba
- Research Scientist at Facebook and Google Brain

Andrej Karpathy
- PhD in Computer Science at Stanford
Open Roles
Top Previous Employers

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