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OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization consisting of the non-profit OpenAI, Inc. registered in Delaware and its for-profit subsidiary 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 has also developed several large language models, such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, as well as advanced image generation models like DALL-E 3, and in the past published open-source models.
The organization was founded in December 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, with a significant portion of the investment in the form of compute resources on Microsoft's Azure cloud service.
On November 17, 2023, the board removed Altman as CEO, while Brockman was removed as chairman and then resigned as president. Four days later, both returned after negotiations with the board, and most of the board members resigned. The new initial board included former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor as chairman. OpenAI also announced that Microsoft would have a non-voting board seat at OpenAI.