OpenAI
AI research company founded 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman and others. Switched from nonprofit to "capped-profit" in 2019.
Behind the GPT series, DALL·E, Whisper, Sora, the o-series (reasoning), Codex. Microsoft has invested $13B+, runs infrastructure via Azure. Drama: the board fired Altman in November 2023, he was back within 5 days; several board members resigned. Ilya Sutskever left in 2024 to start Safe Superintelligence. Valuation ~$300B in 2024.