In December 2015, OpenAI announced itself in a blog post titled “Introducing OpenAI.” The post described the organization as a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company whose goal was to advance digital intelligence in the way most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by the need to generate a financial return.
The announcement listed founding supporters including Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services, Infosys, and YC Research, who together committed $1 billion, though the post noted only a small fraction was expected to be spent in the near term. Ilya Sutskever was named research director and Greg Brockman chief technology officer. As a nonprofit, OpenAI said it would freely share its research through papers, blog posts, and code.
OpenAI’s structure later evolved to include a capped-profit arm to fund the enormous cost of training large models, but the 2015 founding set the stage for GPT-2, GPT-3, and ChatGPT. Its early framing of AI safety and broadly shared benefit shaped much of the public conversation that followed.