OpenAI

Founded in December 2015 by tech luminaries Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba and John Schulman, OpenAI emerged with the audacious goal of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. If the name sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy, it’s because it is. Known for its development of sophisticated language models like GPT-3 and GPT-4, OpenAI has turned the esoteric world of AI into a pop culture phenomenon with tools that can draft essays, generate poetry and maybe even write your next viral tweet. Defining moments include its dramatic pivot from a non-profit to a “capped-profit” model in 2019, and the spectacular debut of ChatGPT, which ignited both wonder and existential dread. Valued at over $100 billion, OpenAI struts as the golden child of tech disruption, but not without its share of controversies. Critics accuse it of stoking the fires of AI hype and fostering ethical concerns that might make Skynet look like a benevolent nanny. Under the leadership of Sam Altman, OpenAI continues to straddle the line between technological marvel and digital messiah, with a flair for turning headlines into its own personal runway show.