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Inside OpenAI: From 2015 to Now Into a $57.6 billion business

Startup Type:

Headquarter: San Francisco, USA

Current Status: Active (partnership with Microsoft; globally influential in AI)

Founders: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever

Founded Year: 2015

Investors: Microsoft, Khosla Ventures, Reid Hoffman

Funding Raised: $57.6 billion

What Is the business model of OpenAI?

Artificial intelligence research and deployment company that licenses its AI models and sells API access to technologies like GPT

How OpenAI got started?

Launched as a research lab with backing from Elon Musk and others to responsibly advance AI, later transitioned to a capped-profit model and built breakthrough AI like ChatGPT

what growth strategy has OpenAI followed?

Gained traction by releasing viral AI demos that attracted users and enterprise partnerships, then secured a landmark $10B investment from Microsoft to scale

what are the top products/features of OpenAI

GPT-4 large language model, ChatGPT chatbot, DALL-E image generator

what was the biggest challenge faced by OpenAI?

Balancing rapid AI advancement with safety concerns and heavy compute costs, and navigating a competitive landscape with tech giants in AI