OpenAI

OpenAI is the company that made ChatGPT. It was founded in San Francisco in 2015 by eleven people, including Sam Altman and Elon Musk, and today it develops the GPT model family alongside products like ChatGPT, Codex, and Sora.

One thing that trips people up is its relationship with Microsoft. Microsoft holds a large stake and has long supplied its servers, but OpenAI is the one actually building GPT. On the flip side, OpenAI also borrows a lot from others — all the computers and chips that run its models come from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and NVIDIA. In short, OpenAI builds the model but rents the factory.

Its structure is also unusual. A nonprofit foundation controls a for-profit company, so the entity with the biggest stake isn't necessarily the one actually running the show. That's why stories asking "who really owns OpenAI" keep coming up.

As of August 2026, its flagship is the GPT-5.6 generation, sold under separate names like Sol and Luna depending on speed and price. Big outside developments keep piling up too — Amazon took a 5% stake for $50 billion, becoming another major backer alongside Microsoft, and NVIDIA agreed to guarantee 4.25 gigawatts of power supply for an Ohio data center site over 20 years. Its valuation, based on an employee stock sale, has climbed to $852 billion.

"Microsoft released GPT" is a wrong statement. GPT is built by OpenAI — Microsoft holds a stake and sells that model bundled into its own products.