Who created AI chatbot ChatGPT and who owns it today?

ChatGPT might have revolutionized technology as we know it, but for the average person, the generative AI tool and its parent company can seem enigmatic. 

Whos behind one of the most game-changing consumer tech products we’ve seen so far this century?

Who created ChatGPT?

ChatGPT was created by American AI research company OpenAI.

The firm is arguably the most famous AI research and development company in the space. While its flagship product ChatGPT burst onto the scene in 2022, OpenAI has been around since December 2015, and was co-founded by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and others.

Altman has served as CEO of the company since 2013 — save for an awkward few days in 2023 where he was briefly fired from the position before being reinstated.

Up until 2019, OpenAI was a non-profit organization, but it is now for-profit and worth an estimated $80 billion.

How does ChatGPT work?

The company’s artificial intelligence model has become renowned for its capacity to understand and respond to textual instructions. The chatbot uses natural language processing (NLP) GPT-4 (generative pre-trained transformer) technology — but “generative” is the keyword here. 

The purpose of generative AI models like ChatGPT is to create something from a prompt. That prompt could be to explain the definition of a word, to brainstorm related ideas, or even tell you a story or write a poem— ChatGPT can do it all. 

Who owns ChatGPT?

As mentioned, ChatGPT is owned by tech company OpenAI.

The CEO of OpenAI in turn is Sam Altman. Born in 1985, Altman is a Stanford University dropout who has been part of Open AI since the start.

Technically, OpenAI was founded by Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman. But different people comprise the board of the non-profit, OpenAI Inc, and Open AI the business.

At the time of the launch, the company’s board of non-profit OpenAI Inc included Altman, Brockman, Sutskever, Schulman, and Zaremba. Meanwhile, additional members of the non-profit board specifically included Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner.

As for Open AI’s executive board, it consists of Altman as President, Brockman as co-founder, Sutskever as Chief Scientist. Other executive employees of OpenAI include  Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati and Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap.

It’s also worth noting that Musk left OpenAI before it all kicked off in November 2022, partly to make his own AI bot Grok and partly to focus, presumably, on his takeover of the platform X which was then referred to as Twitter.

Is OpenAI owned by Microsoft?

A common misconception is that OpenAI is owned by Microsoft, but while the two companies work closely together as partners, OpenAI isn’t a subsidiary of Microsoft.

Instead, Microsoft is what’s known as a key strategic investor in the company. The tech giant first invested in OpenAI in 2019, with a $1 billion investment, and invested a further $13 billion as of April 2023.

“We formed our partnership with OpenAI around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratize AI as a new technology platform,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement at the time.

“In this next phase of our partnership, developers and organizations across industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain with Azure to build and run their applications.”

When was ChatGPT released?

ChatGPT was released as a public demo on November 30, 2022. Back then, the humble chatbot was limited to answering questions with text-based responses, but even that was enough to cause a stir and lead to the AI model going mega-viral.

According to Greg Brockman, who was OpenAI’s then-CEO, the app surpassed 1 million users in just five days. Just two months later, a UBS study (via CBNC) reported that the application had approximately 100 million monthly active users.

So, the February 2023 worldwide release of the subscription-based ChatGPT Plus felt like the next logical step for the company, as did the release of their updated ChatGPT model, GPT-4, the following month.

When is ChatGPT-5 being released?

An exact ChatGPT-5 release date hasn’t been specified, but we know that OpenAI is in the process of training the GPT-5 model. Back in February, during an appearance at the Dubai World Governments Summit (WGS), Altman said that ChatGPT-5 is “going to be smarter” than previous language models.

“It’s not like that this model is going to get a little bit better, it’s because we’re going to make them all smarter, it’s going to be better across the board,” he said.

The current ChatGPT Plus subscription is $20 a month, but it’s entirely possible that once Chat GPT-5 is released, Chat GPT-4 in turn will become more affordable and more widely used.