Vendor lineage
OpenAI
Founded as a non-profit hedge against AI being controlled by one company, and now largely owned by one company.
OpenAI was announced on 11 December 2015 as a non-profit, with $1B in pledged funding and a stated mission to build artificial general intelligence that benefits all of humanity - and to build it in the open rather than behind a single corporation's walls. The non-profit structure was the point: a deliberate hedge against the technology ending up controlled by Google, Microsoft or anyone else.
The founding group included Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba and John Schulman. Schulman led the reinforcement-learning-from-human-feedback work that later made ChatGPT feel like a conversation rather than a text generator.
The structure did not hold. OpenAI restructured as a capped-profit partnership in 2019 and converted to a public benefit corporation in 2025. Microsoft holds roughly 27% of the new entity - about $135B at the March 2026 round - and the non-profit retained 26%. Critics including several former employees argued the conversion reduced the non-profit's practical control over what the company does with what it builds. Whatever one makes of that, it is a striking distance travelled from the founding premise.
ChatGPT launched on 30 November 2022 and was not the original product plan. It reached a million users in five days and a hundred million monthly users in two months, the fastest consumer adoption of anything to that point.
That date is the marker worth having. Large language models existed before it and had been improving for years; what changed was that using one stopped requiring an API key, a research affiliation, or any idea of what a transformer is. The technology did not become capable in November 2022. It became available.