Company
ActiveOpenAI
San Francisco · Since 2015
Still operating. Founded as a nonprofit, it later added a commercial subsidiary, and the legal structure has been rebuilt more than once.
A later timeline chapter projects a role for this organization. That chapter is a projection. This page is about the institution as it exists, or as it existed.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab, with a stated aim of building artificial intelligence that would not be captured by a single firm. In 2019 it created a capped-profit subsidiary so it could raise the money the work actually costs. The structure has been rebuilt since, more than once.
The 2020 language model, and the public chat tool released in 2022, changed the lab into a vendor. Companies that do not employ researchers began buying access, because a fluent draft had become something a customer expected.
A small staff, a wide consequence
OpenAI employs researchers, engineers, and a growing enterprise sales and policy staff. It does not employ the people whose jobs the tool touches. Those people work in the firms that subscribe. The occupation the museum is watching is split: a small, expensive lab, and a large number of clerks, writers, and programmers elsewhere who now start the day with a generated draft they have to check. The checking is the job that grew. The lab does not list it.
A present company inside a projection
OpenAI is a real company with an office and a payroll. Chapters that describe how firms like it will reorganize the office in 2030 are projections. They are not a history of this company past today. The legal form, nonprofit or commercial or something built to be both, is less stable than the fact of the product. The page records both.
The work it organized
- Research scientist
- Applied engineer
- Policy staff
- Enterprise seller