OpenAIPre-IPO

OpenAI was announced as a non-profit research company on December 11, 2015, created the capped-profit OpenAI LP on March 11, 2019, and on October 28, 2025 completed a recapitalisation under which the non-profit, renamed the OpenAI Foundation, controls the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its core technique is the generative pre-trained transformer: a transformer trained without labels to predict the next token of text. The first GPT was described in June 2018, GPT-2 in February 2019, and GPT-3 (175 billion parameters) in 'Language Models are Few-Shot Learners' (Brown et al., May 2020), which reported that a large model could perform new tasks from a few prompt examples. 'Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback' (Ouyang et al., March 2022) fine-tuned GPT-3 on human demonstrations and then on human rankings of outputs using reinforcement learning; OpenAI describes ChatGPT as a sibling of that model.

CLIP (Radford et al., arXiv February 2021) learned image representations from 400 million image-text pairs and was introduced alongside the first DALL-E on January 5, 2021. Whisper, a speech recogniser trained on 680,000 hours of web audio, was open-sourced on September 21, 2022. The 'GPT-4 Technical Report' (March 2023) describes a model accepting image and text input and states that it gives no details of architecture, model size, hardware, training compute or dataset construction.

OpenAI opened an API to its models on June 11, 2020. ChatGPT launched as a research preview on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT Plus on February 1, 2023 and GPT-4 on March 14, 2023. GPT-4o, one model trained across text, audio and images, was announced May 13, 2024; o1-preview, the first of a series trained to spend more time reasoning before answering, on September 12, 2024. The Sora video product launched December 9, 2024; OpenAI's page says it has been unavailable since April 26, 2026. Agent products began with Operator (January 23, 2025) and the cloud coding agent Codex (May 16, 2025). GPT-5 was introduced August 7, 2025, followed by GPT-5.2 (December 11, 2025), GPT-5.5 (April 23, 2026) and GPT-5.6 (July 9, 2026). GPT-6 Astra was released September 3, 2026. OpenAI says Astra is its first model to reach the 'Critical' cybersecurity level of its own Preparedness Framework; that is the company's classification.

Five US patents found on Google Patents are assigned to OpenAI Opco LLC, carry March-April 2023 priority dates and were granted between January and September 2024. They cover language-model text insertion and editing, schema-based connection of external APIs to a natural-language application, hierarchical text-conditional image generation and multi-task speech recognition. Deals began with the Global Illumination team in August 2023; the list below has two in 2024, seven in 2025 and twelve in 2026 to mid-September. The largest are io Products (all-stock, reported at about $6.5 billion, completed July 9, 2025) and Statsig ($1.1 billion in stock, per an OpenAI spokesperson). Several are team hires. Neptune, Promptfoo, Astral, Tomoro and Ona were announced as agreements subject to closing conditions; no completion announcement was found. A reported $3 billion agreement to buy Windsurf collapsed in July 2025 and is not listed.