Who created ChatGPT? The answer is OpenAI, an American AI research company founded in San Francisco in 2015. Sam Altman is the current CEO and the public face of the company. Elon Musk was one of OpenAI’s co-founders, but he left in 2018 after disagreements about the company’s direction.
Who founded OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT?
OpenAI is the organisation behind ChatGPT. It was founded in December 2015 as a non-profit, with a mission to develop AI for the benefit of humanity.
The founders were Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata and Wojciech Zaremba. This broad group of AI researchers and technology experts laid the groundwork for what would later become an AI platform used all over the world.
In 2019 OpenAI moved from a purely non-profit model to a hybrid structure with both non-profit and commercial elements. The change was necessary because developing AI at this scale takes enormous amounts of computing power and capital. According to the announcement of 28 October 2025, the non-profit is now called the OpenAI Foundation and the commercial arm is a public benefit corporation, OpenAI Group PBC, which the non-profit controls.
Who is the CEO of OpenAI and ChatGPT?
Sam Altman has been CEO of OpenAI since 2019. He studied computer science at Stanford, then founded Loopt, and from 2014 to 2019 he was president of Y Combinator, one of the most influential start-up accelerators in Silicon Valley.
Altman holds no shares in OpenAI. His reasoning is that a financial stake can be the wrong motivation when you are developing technology with such far-reaching consequences for society. That fits OpenAI’s original mission of making AI safe and widely accessible.
Who works on ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is developed by a large team of researchers and engineers. Jakub Pachocki is OpenAI’s chief scientist and works closely with Szymon Sidor. Altman describes the two of them as the core of OpenAI’s technical breakthroughs.
The model has been developed over successive GPT generations, each more capable and more accurate than the last.
When was ChatGPT launched?
ChatGPT launched on 30 November 2022 as a free research preview. How that launch went, and which versions followed, is covered in our overview of when ChatGPT came out.
The launch looked like a starting point, but the origins of AI go back decades, to research that long had no public application.
Why did Elon Musk leave OpenAI?
Elon Musk was a co-founder and co-chair of OpenAI, but he stepped down from the board in 2018. The official reason was a potential conflict of interest with Tesla’s own AI work on self-driving cars.
Behind the scenes there were also disagreements about the company’s direction. Musk wanted to take control of OpenAI, and Altman refused. Musk later founded xAI as a direct competitor, with the Grok language model. What began in 2015 as a shared non-profit project is now a competitive market with major commercial interests at stake.
What is Microsoft’s role in ChatGPT?
After Musk left, Microsoft became OpenAI’s most important strategic partner. Microsoft invested billions in OpenAI and built the technology into products such as Bing and Microsoft Copilot.
For a long time ChatGPT ran on Microsoft Azure infrastructure, powered by a supercomputer Microsoft built specifically for OpenAI. That partnership allowed OpenAI to fund the huge computing costs of AI development and to scale quickly. Since the new agreements of October 2025, OpenAI may also run products such as ChatGPT on other cloud providers.
What impact has ChatGPT had on the AI market?
The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 shook up the balance of power in the tech sector. Google declared an internal ‘code red’ because ChatGPT posed a direct threat to the dominance of Google Search. Google responded by rushing out Bard, announced on 6 February 2023 and renamed Gemini in February 2024. A wider race followed, with Meta, Anthropic and others releasing their own models.
Anthropic, the developer of the AI assistant Claude, was co-founded by former OpenAI employees. That pattern, where key talent leaves to start a competitor, shows how fast this field moves, and it explains why there are now several serious alternatives to ChatGPT. For organisations that already use ChatGPT, the question is now a more practical one than which vendor is best: how do you make sure the whole team works with it in the same way? That challenge, AI implementation, is not about choosing the tool itself but about applying that choice consistently in day-to-day work.
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Frequently asked questions about who created ChatGPT
Follow-up questions about the company that made ChatGPT are usually about ownership and about which company you deal with in Europe.
Does Microsoft own ChatGPT?
No, Microsoft does not own ChatGPT, but it is a major shareholder in the company behind it. In the October 2025 restructuring, OpenAI’s commercial arm was placed under OpenAI Group PBC, which is controlled by the non-profit OpenAI Foundation. According to Microsoft’s own figures, it then held about 27 per cent on a fully diluted basis. Microsoft’s rights to OpenAI’s models and products run until the end of 2032.
Which company do you deal with when you use ChatGPT in the EU?
If you use ChatGPT in the EU, your agreement is with OpenAI Ireland Ltd in Dublin, not with the American parent company. OpenAI’s European terms of use set this out for everyone who lives in the European Economic Area or Switzerland. So if you have a question about your contract or a dispute, the Irish entity is the party you deal with.
