2015–2018: Non-profit beginnings
In December 2015, OpenAI was founded by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever See more

Key employees
• CEO and co-founder: Sam Altman, former president of the startup accelerator Y Combinator See more

Some scientists, such as Stephen Hawking and Stuart Russell, have articulated concerns that if advanced AI gains the ability to redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate, an … See more

In the early years before his 2018 departure, Musk posed the question: "What is the best thing we can do to ensure the future is good? We could sit on the sidelines or we … See more

Reinforcement learning
At its beginning, OpenAI's research included many projects focused on reinforcement learning (RL). OpenAI has been viewed as an important competitor to DeepMind.
Gym See more

Contract with Sama
In January 2023, OpenAI has been criticized for outsourcing the annotation of data sets to Sama, a company based in San Francisco but employing workers in Kenya. These annotations were used to train an AI model to … See more

• Anthropic – Artificial intelligence research company
• Center for AI Safety – US-based AI safety research center
• Future of Humanity Institute – Defunct Oxford interdisciplinary … See more