Also known as: OpenAI Inc, OpenAI LP, OpenAI Global LLC
| Date | Event | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | Founded as non-profit with ~$1B founder commitment | Founding | Founding mission "AGI benefits all humanity"; "open by default" research publishing, "safety over competitive advantage." |
| 2018 | GPT-1 released (117M parameters) | Launch | First transformer language model from OpenAI; established the architecture. |
| 2019 | GPT-2 released (1.5B parameters) | Launch | Initially withheld due to misuse concerns; demonstrated growing capability of large language models. |
| 2019 | Restructured to capped-profit LLC | Pivot | Created OpenAI LP capped-profit subsidiary to raise commercial capital while preserving the non-profit parent. |
| 2020 | GPT-3 released (175B parameters) | Launch | Few-shot learning breakthrough that sparked the modern scaling race. |
| Nov 2022 | ChatGPT launched | Launch | InstructGPT/ChatGPT (GPT-3.5 + RLHF) drove mainstream AI adoption; established RLHF as a standard alignment technique. |
| Mar 2023 | GPT-4 released | Launch | Undisclosed multimodal model; human-level performance on many tasks; dangerous capabilities acknowledged. |
| Nov 2023 | Board crisis and Sam Altman ouster/return | Leadership Change | Brief removal of Sam Altman by the non-profit board, followed by his return; restructured board with commercial representation. |