Who is OpenAI, and what is ChatGPT?

Short answer: OpenAI is the American AI company behind ChatGPT. It started in December 2015 as a non-profit research organisation. ChatGPT came out on 30 November 2022 and made AI chatbots known to a huge audience almost overnight.

The beginning

On 11 December 2015, OpenAI announced itself as a non-profit AI research company. Its goal: to advance digital intelligence in the way most likely to benefit humanity as a whole. Sam Altman and Elon Musk were co-chairs at the time, Greg Brockman was CTO and Ilya Sutskever research director.

The structure today

The company structure has changed since then. According to OpenAI, the non-profit is now called the OpenAI Foundation. It controls OpenAI Group PBC, a public benefit corporation that runs the commercial work. That restructuring was completed on 28 October 2025, and Microsoft became one of the largest shareholders.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT launched on 30 November 2022 as a free research preview. It was based on the GPT-3.5 series and trained with human feedback (RLHF): people rated answers and the model learned from that. See How does a language model work?

At launch, OpenAI spelled out the limitations itself. ChatGPT sometimes wrote convincing but wrong answers, reacted differently to small changes in the question, and was often too wordy. That warning is still a good starting point: check what comes out.

ChatGPT has grown a lot since then, with many new models and plans. They change so often that we give no versions or prices here. Check OpenAI's site for the current offer.

What does this mean for you?

For many people, ChatGPT is the first AI tool they use. If you use it for work, agree on which data may and may not go into it. The Dutch Data Protection Authority mentions ChatGPT by name in its warning about data breaches through AI chatbots. See AI and privacy.

As of October 2026. Company details and models change fast; check the current situation at the source.

Sources

Accessed 21 October 2026.