Silicon Valley has a weird habit of rewriting its own history. If you look at the landscape today, you see a multi-billion-dollar titan that dictates the pace of global innovation. But if you want to know when was OpenAI founded, you have to look back to a very specific, slightly frantic series of meetings in late 2015. It wasn't some grand corporate merger. Honestly, it was more like a group of tech billionaires and researchers panicking about the end of the world.
December 11, 2015. That’s the official date.
Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman basically got together and decided they didn't want Google to own the future. It sounds dramatic because it was. At the time, Google had recently acquired DeepMind, and there was a growing fear that artificial general intelligence (AGI) would be locked away behind a proprietary curtain. OpenAI was the "open" alternative. It was supposed to be a non-profit. It was supposed to save us. Fast forward to today, and things look... well, different.
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The Dinner That Changed Everything
You can't really talk about when was OpenAI founded without talking about the Rosewood Sand Hill hotel in Menlo Park.
Back in 2015, Sam Altman was running Y Combinator. Elon Musk was busy with SpaceX and Tesla, but he was increasingly vocal about AI being "summoning the demon." They met up with Greg Brockman, who was the CTO of Stripe at the time. The vibe was very much "we need to do something before it's too late." They weren't trying to build a product for your iPhone. They were trying to build a counter-balance.
They recruited Ilya Sutskever from Google. This was a massive deal. Ilya was a protege of Geoffrey Hinton and one of the minds behind AlexNet. Bringing him over was essentially a declaration of war on the established tech giants. The initial funding came from a "who's who" of tech: Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Peter Thiel, Jessica Livingston, and companies like AWS and Infosys. They pledged $1 billion.
Did they actually have $1 billion in the bank on day one? No. It was a commitment. But it was enough to get the best researchers in the world to leave high-paying jobs at places like Facebook (now Meta) and Google.
Why 2015 was the Pivot Point
The timing wasn't an accident. 2015 was the year deep learning went from a niche academic interest to the most important thing in software. The researchers realized that if you just kept adding more data and more compute, the models got exponentially better.
OpenAI started in a small office in the Mission District of San Francisco. It wasn't glamorous. It was a bunch of guys in hoodies eating takeout and trying to figure out how to make a computer understand human language. They started with Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Gym, trying to get AI to play video games. The goal wasn't ChatGPT; the goal was "safe" AGI.
The Shift From Non-Profit to "Capped" Profit
When OpenAI was founded, the non-profit status was its defining characteristic. The mission statement was clear: "to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity."
But there was a problem.
AI is expensive. Like, "we need billions of dollars for electricity and chips" expensive. By 2019, the leadership realized they couldn't compete with Google's bank account while relying on donations. They created a "capped-profit" entity called OpenAI LP. This allowed them to take massive investments from Microsoft.
- 2015: Non-profit launch.
- 2018: Elon Musk leaves the board (citing potential future conflicts with Tesla's AI work).
- 2019: The "Capped-Profit" pivot.
- 2022: The launch of ChatGPT, which broke the internet.
Some people feel betrayed by this. They look at the 2015 founding documents and compare them to the multi-billion dollar partnership with Microsoft and see a contradiction. Others argue that without that money, we’d still be stuck with Siri-level intelligence. It's a messy, ongoing debate that defines the current state of the industry.
The Secret Sauce: The Original Team
We focus a lot on the founders, but the "founding members" list is where the real work happened. People like Andrej Karpathy (who later went to Tesla and then back to OpenAI) and Pamela Vagata were there from the jump.
They didn't start with Transformers. That paper (Attention Is All You Need) didn't even come out until 2017—and it came from Google! OpenAI’s brilliance wasn't necessarily inventing the core architecture; it was the relentless, obsessive scaling of that architecture. They took the Transformer and decided to see what would happen if they fed it the entire internet.
Realities of the Founding Era
It's easy to look back with rose-colored glasses. But honestly, the early days were chaotic. There was no guarantee of success. In 2015, most people thought AGI was 50 years away. The OpenAI team thought it might be 10. They were the outliers.
The tension between "open" and "closed" started early. Originally, they promised to share all their research. As the models got more powerful (and more dangerous), the "Open" in OpenAI started to feel like a bit of a misnomer. They stopped releasing the weights for their models. They stopped publishing the full details of their training data. Security became the primary excuse—or reason, depending on who you ask.
What Most People Get Wrong
People think OpenAI was an overnight success with ChatGPT.
It wasn't.
It was seven years of burning cash, failed experiments, and niche research before they hit the jackpot. When they were founded in 2015, they were the underdogs. It's hard to imagine that now when they are the ones everyone is trying to disrupt.
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Moving Forward: What You Should Do
Understanding when and why OpenAI was founded helps you see where the technology is going. This isn't just a tech company; it's a philosophical experiment that got out of hand. If you're looking to keep up with this fast-moving space, don't just look at the latest product launches.
Audit the papers. If you want to see the DNA of the company, go back and read their early blog posts from 2015 and 2016 on "Concrete Problems in AI Safety." It’s still relevant.
Track the talent. The "OpenAI Mafia" is a real thing. Dozens of early employees have left to start their own companies like Anthropic (founded by the Amodei siblings) and Perplexity. If you want to know what the next big thing is, follow the people who were in that Mission District office in 2016.
Don't ignore the governance. The 2023 boardroom drama where Sam Altman was briefly fired and then rehired was a direct result of the weird "non-profit-oversees-a-for-profit" structure created during the founding years. This structure is still in place, and it’s still weird.
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Watch the legal filings. There are ongoing lawsuits from authors and news organizations regarding the data used to train these models. The "open" spirit of 2015 is being tested in courtrooms today.
Stay skeptical but stay curious. The 2015 version of OpenAI wanted to democratize the most powerful technology in history. Whether they are still doing that is the most important question in tech right now. Keep an eye on how they balance their original "safety" mission with the immense pressure to generate returns for investors like Microsoft. The history is still being written, and it’s a lot messier than a Wikipedia entry makes it look.