What is OpenAI? Things to know about OpenAI

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research company that offers popular services like ChatGPT. Here’s what you need to know OpenAI.

What is OpenAI?

OpenAI is a leading AI research company with cutting-edge technologies like ChatGPT. The company then switched to a for-profit model (OpenAI LP) in 2019 to secure funding for large-scale AI development. The company’s headquarters is located in San Francisco, California and has played a key role in advancing AI technologies.

OpenAI’s main AI models

OpenAI is famous for its GPT line of AI models. Google introduced the groundbreaking Transformer architecture in 2017, and shortly after, OpenAI launched the GPT-1 model leveraging the Transformer architecture. GPT-1 is trained on 117 million parameters. Next, in 2019, OpenAI launched GPT-2 with 1.5 billion parameters.

By 2020, OpenAI announced GPT-3 and scaled it to 175 billion parameters. It can produce human-like text in many different fields. By 2022, GPT-3.5 was released and it powered the first version of ChatGPT. This became a turning point in AI history.

Following that, in 2023, OpenAI released the even more powerful GPT-4. Then we saw the launch of multimodal GPT-4o, along with OpenAI’s inference models including o1, o3, and o4. Finally, in 2025, OpenAI launched GPT-4.5, GPT-5, and then GPT-5.1. The latest GPT-5 series has integrated both thinking and non-thinking AI models.

OpenAI has also released the powerful ChatGPT Agent, Deep Research AI agent and Shopping Research agent. Besides, OpenAI launched Dall-E in 2021 to generate AI images. The company continues with Dall-E 2 in 2022 and Dall-E 3 in 2023. As for image generation, OpenAI has stopped training Diffusion models and is now using the multimodal capabilities of GPT family models to create AI images.

Regarding video, OpenAI launched Sora in 2024, its first video-from-text model. And finally in 2025, Sora 2 was announced with improved physics simulation and synchronized audio.

How did OpenAI train ChatGPT?

ChatGPT was initially based on just one large language model. It is an AI system trained on large data sets to understand and produce human language. The newest GPT model, GPT-4o, is multimodal, meaning it also understands images, audio, and video.

OpenAI says its large language models (LLMs) use information publicly available on the internet; information that the company licenses from third parties; and data from OpenAI users and trainers. However, the training data is only updated up to a certain date. In the case of the GPT-4o and GPT-4o Mini, that date is October 2023.

Furthermore, OpenAI says it filters out data it doesn’t want its models to learn from, such as hate language, adult content, and spam. The information that goes into LLM is called training data, and OpenAI, like other generative AI makers, has not shared exactly what information is in their training data.

The future of OpenAI

OpenAI is continuing its research to achieve its original mission — developing secure artificial general intelligence (AGI). Before that, however, the company seemed more focused on building profitable products for consumers and businesses. Recently, OpenAI acquired IO, an AI hardware startup founded by Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer. The company aims to launch an AI device in 2026, but without a screen.

Additionally, critics say OpenAI is no longer available “open” anymore because the company stopped sharing its research with the open source community. They are also prioritizing commercial success over safety and non-profit ideals. While OpenAI remains at the forefront of AI development, the company must not forget its original principle of building safe and beneficial AGI.