Who Owns ChatGPT?

This article provides a look at OpenAI and ChatGPT, who made them, and who's in charge today.

Who Made ChatGPT?

OpenAI is one of the latest mega-companies to come out of the artificial intelligence boom, with its flagship products, ChatGPT, Dall-E, and lately, Sora, making major splashes for their advanced natural-language processing and ability to converse and respond to humans in realistic ways.

OpenAI is the sole owner of ChatGPT, despite lots of external investment in the product and the company behind it.

OpenAI was originally founded in 2015 as a non-profit AI research organization by Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Jessica Livingston, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba. Elon Musk and Altman served as the initial board of directors, with Musk being the primary early investor in the company.

OpenAI received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft in 2019, followed by a further $10 billion investment in 2023, as part of the use of ChatGPT to power Bing Chat and other Microsoft AI efforts. Microsoft has a non-voting seat on the ChatGPT board, but it doesn't have a controlling stake in the company. OpenAI systems also run on Microsoft's Azure supercomputing platform.

As of 2024, OpenAI's original non-profit status remains, but it has an acting subsidiary called OpenAI Global, which is a capped for-profit organization and operates the main ChatGPT service. This was reportedly to allow for greater external investment in the company and make it easier to distribute shares and other perks to employees to attract better candidates for important roles.

Although there was some turmoil in the OpenAI board in the Fall of 2023, where CEO Sam Altman was temporarily ousted, he soon returned after an exodus of OpenAI staff. Altman and OpenAI's president, Greg Brockman, also work as part of an advanced AI research team at Microsoft despite OpenAI continuing to be their main focus.

When Did ChatGPT Come Out?

Although OpenAI developed a number of GPT language models internally as part of its AI research efforts, it only released its first commercial ChatGPT service in December 2022. This first version of the AI chatbot was based on its GPT-3.5 language model,

OpenAI expanded that offering in March 2023, when it launched the GPT-4 language model, but limited it for use behind its ChatGPT Plus subscription service, along with access to the GPT-4 API.

Microsoft would go on to launch Copilot, a chatbot for Windows and its Office applications based on OpenAI technology. Copilot does not use the ChatGPT language models.

OpenAI launched the latest version of ChatGPT in May 2024. GPT-4o introduced multi-modality to the AI in a much broader array of capabilities than ever before. This version is faster than its predecessor and offers more functionality to both free and paid users.

Who Invented ChatGPT?

ChatGPT was created by OpenAI, although the concept of AI chatbots has existed for far longer.

The original concept of natural language processing in the realm of artificial intelligence can be traced back to the 1940s when Alan Turing proposed a test involving automated interpretation and generation of language that would appear natural and legible to humans.

Symbolic efforts were made to develop NLP models over the ensuing decades, but it wasn't until the integration with big data and machine learning, along with the advanced computing power of the 2010s, that its development really accelerated. This led to the first viable NLM commercial product in ChatGPT.

What Else Does OpenAI Make?

OpenAI is also behind the development and release of all new versions of ChatGPT, including the more advanced GPT-4 language model that has been available as part of ChatGPT Plus since March 2023 and the latest GPT-4o language model, launched in May 2024.

The company also developed a generative AI for imagery, DALL-E; a speech recognition tool called Whisper; and an algorithm for creating music known as Jukebox. OpenAI also created a team of video game bots called OpenAI Five, that were able to play against professional DOTA 2 teams at a high level.