Elon Musk co-founded the AI research nonprofit OpenAI in 2015.
OpenAI was announced in December 2015 as a nonprofit artificial-intelligence research organization. Its stated purpose was to promote and develop friendly artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity. Musk was among the organization’s initial high-profile supporters and co-chairs, alongside figures including Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba.
Musk left OpenAI’s board in 2018. The organization later created a for-profit subsidiary and became known for systems such as GPT-3 and ChatGPT. Those later developments should not be projected backward onto the organization’s original nonprofit structure.
OpenAI is distinct from xAI, which Musk founded in 2023. It is also separate from DeepMind, an AI company founded in Britain and acquired by Google in 2014.