AIster · Prologue · Funding
OpenAI launches as a non-profit
The company that later built ChatGPT started with $1 billion in pledges
Key facts
- Date
- 11 Dec 2015
- Era
- Prologue
- Interest
- Funding
- Threads
- Safety & governance, Labs & people
- Co-chairs
- Sam Altman and Elon Musk
- Research director / CTO
- Ilya Sutskever / Greg Brockman
- Amount
- $1 billion
- Backers
- Altman, Brockman, Musk, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, AWS, Infosys, YC Research
OpenAI was announced as a non-profit AI research company, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk as co-chairs, Ilya Sutskever as research director and Greg Brockman as chief technology officer. Backers committed $1 billion. Its stated aim was to benefit humanity “unconstrained by a need to generate financial return”.
Sources
- OpenAI, Introducing OpenAI, 2015-12-11
- TechCrunch, Non-profit OpenAI launches with backing from Elon Musk and Sam Altman, 2015-12-11