OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research lab and applied AI company building artificial general intelligence (AGI) and derived generative AI products and services. OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a non-profit organization with a commitment of USD 1 billion from Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO), Tesla’s Elon Musk, Microsoft, and AWS.

In November 2022, OpenAI launched its own application called “ChatGPT,” a chatbot that utilizes its foundation models, fine-tuned to interact with users in a conversational manner via a web platform. ChatGPT is offered through several subscription plans: 1) A free version that offers unlimited interaction; 2) ChatGPT Plus with faster response times, guaranteed access during peak hours, and early access to new features; 3) ChatGPT Team tailored for smaller, solution-oriented groups; and 4) ChatGPT Enterprise, a business-focused iteration that provides "enterprise-grade" privacy, data analysis features, enhanced performance, and customization options, and 5) ChatGPT Pro, a tier that provides unlimited access to all OpenAI models, including the full version of its o1 reasoning model. The free version comes with access to the GPT 3.5 model, while others offer access to GPT-4 and other models like DALL.E. The company launched ChatGPT Search, a web search feature integrated into its ChatGPT platform in October 2024.

Some other notable chatbot features include voice conversations, image interactions, video generations, the ability to upload and work with files, a platform to create custom versions of ChatGPT named “GPTs,” a “Memory” feature to personalize and enhance the user experience, “Projects” to organize ChatGPT chats, Voice Engine for synthetic voice creation, accessibility on landline phones and WhatsApp, image editing, web browsing, emotional nuance understanding, and enhanced vision capabilities to answer queries related to images or screens powered by the GPT-4o model. In August 2024, OpenAI announced a new GPT-4o feature that allows corporate clients to fine-tune their GPT-4o model using company-specific data and in October 2024, launched Canvas, a new ChatGPT interface that provides a separate workspace for writing and coding projects. 

In September 2024, OpenAI unveiled a new AI model series called o1, designed to "think through" a question before responding to users. The model reportedly is designed to respond to more complicated questions in science, coding, and math and can solve multi-step problems. Potential use cases of the technology include annotating cell sequencing data for healthcare research, generating complicated mathematical formulas quantum optics, and building and executing multi-step workflows in coding.

ChatGPT also allows the use of plug-ins, enabling the language model to access information beyond its training data and perform limited external actions. Over 70 third-party plug-ins were rolled out in May 2023, including Wolfram, Zapier, Instacart, and Expedia. OpenAI also unveiled two of its own plug-ins—a web browser and a code interpreter—and open-sourced a third that allows the retrieval of information from personal documents and databases.

In August 2023, OpenAI announced the acquisition of Global Illumination, a developer of AI-based creative tools, infrastructure, and digital experiences, marking its first public acquisition.

Key customers and partnerships

In 2016, the company partnered with Microsoft to leverage Azure cloud computing services to train and run its AI models. The two firms expanded their partnership in 2019 alongside a USD 1 billion funding package, with Microsoft becoming OpenAI’s exclusive cloud service provider. OpenAI has plans to develop a hardware-software platform within Azure and jointly develop supercomputing technologies.

OpenAI has entered partnership with several media companies including Le Monde and Prisa Media, Axel Springer, TIME, Condé Nast, and Future Publishing, to allow users to engage with their content on recent events in ChatGPT. Additionally, it partnered with G42, a UAE-based technology holding group, to deliver advanced AI solutions in the UAE and regional markets (October 2023), Common Sense Media to develop guidelines and educational resources for AI applications for young users (January 2024), and PwC as a retribution partner for ChatGPT (May 2024).

The company has also partnered with Apple to develop a version of ChatGPT exclusively designed for Apple's Vision Pro headset and integrate ChatGPT into its apps, including Siri.

In November 2023, it was reported that the company had 100 million weekly active users. Some of OpenAI’s notable customers include Klarna, Holiday Extras, Match Group, Instacart, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Carrefour, the Government of Iceland, USAID and T-Mobile. In addition, many startups across the GenAI space leverage OpenAI models to build applications.