Valued at $750 billion, OpenAI today rivals technology companies that took decades to build. What began as a nonprofit research lab has evolved into a full-stack AI company, spanning frontier models, consumer and enterprise applications, compute infrastructure and AI hardware.
By comparison, Microsoft, founded in 1975, now trades at a valuation above $3 trillion after more than 40 years in business. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, became one of the fastest firms to surpass a multi-trillion-dollar value roughly two decades after its 2004 IPO.
Amazon, launched in 1994, followed a similar arc, building its valuation over years of expansion in cloud computing and e-commerce.
OpenAI’s rise has unfolded at a dramatically faster pace. As the company completes 10 years in December, CEO Sam Altman reflected on its trajectory in a blog post.
“OpenAI has achieved more than I dared to dream possible; we set out to do something crazy, unlikely, and unprecedented,” he wrote.
Altman is explicit about what comes next. He said he believes OpenAI is “almost certain” to build superintelligence within the next decade. The transformation, he suggested, may feel subtle on the surface. “The people of 2035 will be capable of doing things that I just don’t think we can easily imagine right now.”
Tyler Johnston, executive director of the nonprofit Midas Project, described OpenAI’s growth as historically compressed. “OpenAI is a company that has existed on this insanely accelerated lifespan,” Johnston told TechBrew, adding that the scale of change within the organisation over a decade has been “astonishing”.
“It’s just astonishing how much has happened in the 10 years that it’s existed, and how many different visions of the organisation have, at various times, flourished or been squashed based on how convenient they were to the leadership at the time.”
From boardroom tussles and leadership reshuffles to escalating rivalry with Google and other tech giants, OpenAI’s journey has resembled a high-stakes battle. More recently, the company has declared a “code red” competitive posture, culminating in the release of its latest flagship model, GPT-5.2.
So how did it all begin?
In December 2015, a group of researchers and investors, including Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman, pledged $1 billion to launch a nonprofit lab.
There was no product roadmap, no revenue model and no certainty of survival. What guided it instead was the conviction that AI would reshape the world, and that its direction could not be left unchecked.
A decade later, OpenAI has become a central pillar of the global AI ecosystem, being one of the most influential companies in the world. Its models now power startups, enterprises, governments, classrooms, creative studios and developer ecosystems.
As Daleep Singh, former deputy national security adviser and head of global macroeconomic research at PGIM, puts it, OpenAI’s influence has grown so pervasive that “if OpenAI falters, the foundations for the entire AI sector become fragile.” He told Axios, “You have to think about the financial contagion.”
The Early Years: Research Before Revenue
From 2016 to 2018, OpenAI looked like a traditional research lab. It released open tools like Gym and Universe, trained reinforcement-learning agents to play Atari games, and published robotics breakthroughs such as a robotic hand capable of solving a Rubik’s Cube.
In 2018, Musk stepped down from OpenAI’s board, citing potential conflicts with Tesla’s AI efforts. It later emerged that he had proposed taking control of OpenAI and merging it with Tesla, believing the company was falling behind Google.
Despite the turbulence, the research did not slow down. The first mainstream breakthrough came in 2019 with OpenAI Five, which defeated professional human players at Dota 2. The feat proved that large-scale learning systems could master complexity far beyond scripted rules.
That same year, OpenAI released GPT-2, but delayed its full release citing safety concerns. The move sparked controversy and set the tone for how the company would balance progress with risk.
In 2020 came GPT-3, a 175-billion-parameter language model that stunned developers. It could write essays, generate code, answer questions and mimic styles with uncanny fluency.
ChatGPT: When AI Went Mainstream
Then came November 2022.
ChatGPT was released as a research preview, powered by GPT-3.5. Within days, it spread faster than any consumer app in history. For the first time, AI felt conversational, accessible and personal. OpenAI soon followed with subscription plans, launching ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Enterprise.
By 2023, OpenAI had crossed into the multi-billion-dollar annual revenue, driven by subscriptions, API usage and enterprise licensing.
The Boardroom Crisis That Nearly Broke OpenAI
In late 2023, OpenAI’s board abruptly removed Sam Altman as CEO, citing governance concerns. Within days, employees revolted, Microsoft intervened, and Altman was reinstated. The episode exposed deep tensions inside the company—between safety and speed, research and commercialisation, nonprofit oversight and market pressure.
In the aftermath, OpenAI restructured its board, consolidated leadership and began moving towards a more conventional corporate setup. By 2025, OpenAI formally transitioned into a public-benefit corporation, with a new nonprofit foundation holding a significant ownership stake.
Beyond Text and GPT-4o
OpenAI never intended to remain text-only. In January 2021, the launch of DALL·E showed that models could generate images from imagination. Whisper soon followed, tackling speech recognition.
Then, in 2024, it unveiled Sora, a text-to-video model capable of producing cinematic clips from simple prompts. However, the defining release of the year was GPT-4o, OpenAI’s first natively multimodal model. It brought real-time voice interaction that allowed users to speak with the model in natural, low-latency conversations.
In 2025, OpenAI introduced native image generation in GPT-4o, a release that quickly went viral due to the Ghibli-style image trend across social platforms.
And that wasn’t all.
This year also saw the launch of Sora 2 alongside a standalone app, as well as a partnership with Disney, opening access to its vast catalogue of characters and worlds to generate.
GPT-5, GPT-5.1, GPT-5.2…
GPT-5 arrived at a moment when OpenAI’s strategy was already clear. Released in 2025, it was presented as a consolidation model. Instead of fragmenting capabilities across dozens of specialised systems, OpenAI positioned GPT-5 as a single system that could write, reason, use tools, analyse images and carry context across long sessions.
GPT-5.2 is the company’s latest launch, which it claims is its best model for professional work.
Over the past couple of years, OpenAI has also introduced tools beyond ChatGPT, including Codex for AI-assisted programming, Atlas browser for exploring large and structured knowledge sources, and reasoning models such as the o1 series, designed to handle complex, multi-step problem-solving rather than simple text prediction.
Business Growth, Partnerships and Valuation
OpenAI’s business model and partnerships evolved rapidly. What began in 2020 as an experiment with APIs has grown into a business powered by subscriptions, enterprise deals and developers building on top of its models.
According to Altman, OpenAI is on track to cross a $20 billion annualised revenue run rate by the end of this year. That growth, however, carries a cost that few companies in history have had to confront.
Modern AI does not scale quietly.
To meet rising demand, OpenAI is planning infrastructure investments of roughly $1.4 trillion over the next eight years. That ambition is now taking physical shape through Stargate, the company’s long-term effort to build next-generation AI data centres for frontier models.
OpenAI has raised about $64 billion overall, with the March $40 billion round led by SoftBank, Microsoft, Thrive Capital, Dragoneer, Coatue and Altimeter.
The Messy Middle of the OpenAI Story
As OpenAI’s reach expanded, so did the list of people willing to challenge it.
The most serious pressure came through the courts. In late 2023 and 2024, authors including George RR Martin, John Grisham and Sarah Silverman, along with major publishers, filed lawsuits accusing OpenAI of training its models on copyrighted books without permission. The New York Times followed with its own lawsuit, alleging that OpenAI models could reproduce large portions of its articles and were built using its journalism without authorisation.
The legal risk was significant. By 2024, the company began signing licensing deals with media groups such as News Corp, choosing compromise over conflict.
The same year brought internal change. Several senior leaders and researchers left the company, including co-founder and chief scientist Sutskever and chief technology officer Mira Murati.
What’s Next?
A decade in, OpenAI sits at an unusual crossroads. It is no longer just a research lab wrestling with abstract questions about AI, nor is it a conventional technology company chasing incremental growth. It has become a platform, an infrastructure provider and, increasingly, a reference point for how AI power is built, governed and distributed.
The coming years will test whether OpenAI can hold together its founding ideals and its present-day realities. The push toward superintelligence, the scale of capital and infrastructure required, and the growing scrutiny from regulators, courts and competitors all raise questions that cannot be answered by model releases alone.
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