Editorial illustration for OpenAI, a Series F San Francisco startup founded in 2015 by eight pioneers
OpenAI: How a Startup Survived AI's Boom-Bust Cycle
OpenAI, a Series F San Francisco startup founded in 2015 by eight pioneers
In 2015, eight people promised to build a safe, beneficial god. They called it OpenAI. What they built instead is a $500 billion corporate engine.
The mission was artificial general intelligence for all humanity. The result is a San Francisco Series F startup valued like a small country. It has raised nearly $58 billion.
It makes the tools that are remaking white-collar work, art, and cheating on homework. The nonprofit research lab is gone. In its place is the most powerful AI company on earth.
OpenAI OpenAI is a Series F startup company based in San Francisco, founded in 2015 by Greg Brockman, John Schulman, Andrej Karpathy, Wojciech Zaremba, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Durk Kingma, Pamela Vagata, Elon Musk, Trevor Blackwell, and Vicki Cheung. Originally conceived as a research organisation focused on ensuring artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits humanity, OpenAI has since evolved into the most influential AI company in the world. The company has raised $57.9 billion across nine funding rounds from investors including Microsoft, Thrive Capital, and MIS, and currently carries a valuation of $500 billion.
The founders launched a rocket. The world is now a passenger. The original charter, that bit about benefiting humanity, is now a quarterly earnings question.
Its products are everywhere. Its control is held by a few. The company’s trajectory rewrote Silicon Valley’s rules for ambition, swapping moonshots for market dominance.
Every line of code it releases tests an old ideal against a new, very expensive reality.
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Common Questions Answered
What is Prism and how does OpenAI describe its role in scientific research?
Prism is a free, web-based scientific workspace that integrates GPT-5.2 to assist researchers in writing, collaboration, and review processes. OpenAI describes it as an early step towards embedding AI more deeply into scientific workflows, designed to help review claims, refine arguments, and surface prior research while leaving critical judgement to human researchers.
How does GPT-5.2 improve professional knowledge work according to OpenAI?
GPT-5.2 is designed to unlock significant economic value, with OpenAI reporting that the average ChatGPT Enterprise user saves 40-60 minutes daily, and heavy users save more than 10 hours per week. The model demonstrates improved performance across various professional tasks, including creating spreadsheets, building presentations, writing code, and handling complex multi-step projects.
What are the key performance improvements of GPT-5.2 across different domains?
GPT-5.2 shows remarkable performance improvements across multiple domains, including outperforming industry professionals on the GDPval benchmark across 44 occupations with a 70.9% win or tie rate. The model also demonstrates significant advances in scientific reasoning, with a 92.4% score on GPQA Diamond science questions and a 100% success rate on the AIME 2025 competition math challenge.
