OpenAI

These companies are built to exhibit resilience amid volatility—and deliver better-than-average growth in the long term.

Three years ago, few people outside of Silicon Valley were aware of OpenAI. Today, virtually every business leader is obsessing over how to use, adapt to, or compete with ChatGPT, the large language model OpenAI invented. The protean startup has become almost synonymous with generative AI, and its groundbreaking advancements have earned it unparalleled influence. After an October funding round, the company is valued at a dizzying $157&nbsp;billion.OpenAI and cofounder and CEO Sam Altman have raced to solidify this first-mover advantage: In late October, OpenAI introduced its first AI-powered search engine, and the company is tackling its ever-growing processing needs by developing its own chips in-house. The New York Times has reported that the startup anticipates $3.7&nbsp;billion in revenue in 2024—and more than three times that much in 2025. The trillion-dollar question: How long can OpenAI sustain its leading position, as deep-pocketed competitors like Google, Amazon Web Services, and major OpenAI investor Microsoft strengthen their own AI products?

The Future 50

These 50 companies exemplify the innovation, progress, and potential of AI.

AI Innovators 2025-Open AI

Fortune 50 AI Innovators

The essential guide to a sector that’s now attracting one out of every four startup investment dollars.

AI-Innovators-2023-OpenAI

OpenAI rocked the world with the launch of ChatGPT in November of 2022—and then again in mid-November when the abrupt ouster of cofounder Sam Altman captivated the business and tech worlds over an insane weekend of boardroom drama. It’s not remotely clear what the fallout from the OpenAI combustion may eventually be. And, as Fortune has reported, it was the unusual corporate structure that OpenAI was built upon that enabled the power struggle <a href="https://fortune.com/2023/11/20/openai-unusual-governance-structure-sam-altman-ousted/">to play out in the first place</a>. Founded in 2015 as a nonprofit (the company has since added a capped-profit arm) by a group of tech entrepreneurs including Elon Musk (who has since broken with the company) and now ex-CEO Altman, OpenAI is among those in the AI space whose explicit goal is the creation of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a single AI model that can perform any economically-valuable intellectual task humans can as well or better than we can. It took only two months for ChatGPT to reportedly garner 100 million monthly active users, making it the fastest-growing consumer application ever at the time. OpenAI’s latest version, GPT-4 Turbo, which users of OpenAI's paid ChatGPT Plus service and enterprise customers of its API have access to, is the most capable general-purpose large language foundation model yet released. It can do everything from write code to write plays, as well as create images, give you recipes based on a photo of what is in your fridge, and use an increasing number of internet-connected tools. A version of GPT-4 is also integrated with Microsoft’s search engine, Bing. Its massive ambitions have earned OpenAI equally massive funding—including $13 billion from Microsoft alone. But the company’s innovations have also put it under scrutiny, including from the government, over what its technologies could do and what regulations should govern—and control—it. The company is also facing numerous lawsuits for copyright infringement and data privacy leaks. Whatever ends up happening with Altman and the rest of the OpenAI team, you can bet on this, the world will be watching.

Future 50

Overall Score

Sector

OpenAI Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

legacy

openai

OpenAI Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

Eleanor Pringle

This OpenAI engineer left her dream job and San Francisco home to move to Stockholm—all because of Trump 2.0

/2025/09/01/openai-engineer-left-dream-job-sf-sweden-stockholm-trump/

Muskaan Arshad

Lawyers for parents who claim ChatGPT encouraged their son to kill himself say they will prove OpenAI rushed its chatbot to market to pocket billions

/2025/08/27/adam-raine-openai-chatgpt-wrongful-death-lawsuit-lawyers/

Andrew Nusca

Gird your loins, it’s almost time for Nvidia earnings

/2025/08/27/gird-your-loins-its-almost-time-for-nvidia-earnings/

Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez

OpenAI’s president and Andreessen Horowitz are helping lead a $100 million Silicon Valley push against tougher AI laws and the lawmakers behind them

/2025/08/26/openai-president-greg-brockman-andreessen-horowitz-super-pac-ai-pro-innovation/

xAI sues Apple and OpenAI

/2025/08/26/xai-sues-apple-and-openai/

Preston Fore

OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman says in 10 years' time college graduates will be working 'some completely new, exciting, super well-paid' job in space

https://fortune.com/2025/08/11/openai-ceo-sam-altman-10-years-gen-alpha-college-graduates-working-in-solar-system-well-paid-jobs-as-gen-z-struggles-todays-job-market/?itm_source=parsely-api

Emma Burleigh

OpenAI may soon be the most valuable private company—but Sam Altman’s net worth won’t jolt, as the CEO holds no equity and makes just $76,001 a year

https://fortune.com/2025/08/21/openai-billionaire-ceo-sam-altman-new-valuation-personal-finance-zero-equity-salary-investments/?itm_source=parsely-api

Nick Lichtenberg

‘It’s almost tragic’: Bubble or not, the AI backlash is validating what one researcher and critic has been saying for years

https://fortune.com/2025/08/24/is-ai-a-bubble-market-crash-gary-marcus-openai-gpt5/?itm_source=parsely-api

Sharon Goldman

AGI talk is out in Silicon Valley’s latest vibe shift, but worries remain about superpowered AI

https://fortune.com/2025/08/25/tech-agi-hype-vibe-shift-superpowered-ai/?itm_source=parsely-api

Jessica Coacci

77% of Gen Z job seekers have brought a parent to an interview—they're even getting them to negotiate pay rises and take their hiring tests

https://fortune.com/2025/08/14/gen-z-job-seekers-have-brought-a-parent-to-interview-research-reveals/?itm_source=parsely-api

Beatrice Nolan

Leading AI models show up to 96% blackmail rate when their goals or existence is threatened, Anthropic study says

https://fortune.com/2025/06/23/ai-models-blackmail-existence-goals-threatened-anthropic-openai-xai-google/?itm_source=parsely-api

Eva Roytburg

Sam Altman admits OpenAI ‘totally screwed up’ its GPT-5 launch and says the company will spend trillions of dollars on data centers

https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/sam-altman-openai-chatgpt5-launch-data-centers-investments/?itm_source=parsely-api

Dave Smith

Sam Altman says colleagues are glad he’s a dad now, because they think raising a child will help him make ‘better decisions for humanity’

https://fortune.com/2025/08/22/sam-altman-parenting-raising-child-better-decisions-humanity/?itm_source=parsely-api

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says he’s created more billionaires in his team than any CEO in the world

https://fortune.com/2025/07/28/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-billionaires-stock-compensation-ai-talent-war-meta-openai/?itm_source=parsely-api

Meta’s $100 million signing bonuses for OpenAI staff are just the latest sign of extreme AI talent war 

https://fortune.com/2025/06/18/metas-100-million-signing-bonuses-openai-staff-extreme-ai-talent-war/?itm_source=parsely-api

This week, Allie interviews Taylor Otwell, Founder and CEO of Laravel. Together they discuss Laravel's rise as an Arkansas-based tech company, Taylor's early decisions as a founder, and the passionate Laravel community. Also in this episode: Figma's succesful IPO, OpenAI's latest funding round and the deal of week: Joby Aviation.

OpenAI Raises More Capital, Joby Aviation’s Air Taxi Play & The Power of Community in Tech

Tech

What must an AI company do to justify an eye-watering $300 billion valuation? Answer: Make money—and lots of it. As OpenAI reconfigures itself for revenue, the U.S. company is looking further afield than its home turf for growth. We talk to its international chief about scaling responsibly, partnering globally, and the unending pursuit of AGI. 

OpenAI's Global Ambitions

Conferences

Microsoft’s chief privacy officer—and a former commissioner for the U.S.  government agency responsible for protecting online privacy—discusses AI  regulation, how digital safety and tech uniquely impact the lives of women and  children, and the role her company is playing in the global adoption of responsible AI. 

Training AI to Play By The Rules

Hello everybody. OK, so Julie, what are the whole uh range of other things that you do? Lots and lots of things. So privacy, responsible AI, digital safety data governance, it's sort of the whole suite of sounds super, super easy. It's really easy, yeah, yeah, great. OK, so, um, let's let's get into it, uh, lots of very hefty topics, um, I know you recently you're, you're always attending policy, privacy, um. Conferences, but there was one in Venice you were at recently in DC um what what's top of mind at these events right now? So what's fascinating in terms of what's going on right now is there seems to be a consensus that is developing among global regulators, not just in Europe, not just in the United States, but in Asia and elsewhere, which is regulation is deeply important and it's the same. Time regulators need to make sure that there will be innovation. So there's a lot of discussion right now about how do we ensure that we are enabling innovation while protecting fundamental rights and also how do we make sure that startups and small and medium enterprises can navigate the regulatory space? We've heard a lot earlier in Conference about how difficult it can be for those kinds of entities. So regulators are looking at simplification. They're looking at harmonizing across all of these different domains, and they're really looking to drive and enable innovation, and that's actually quite refreshing seeing that now. You've been on both sides, right? Also, you've spent some time on the government side, yes, which do you like better? No, I'm just joking. I um yes, yes, yeah, sure, that's a good answer. um OK, let's uh talk about safety. You spend a lot of time thinking again from from both perspectives from your previous, um, you know, previous career as well, um, as your current one about safety when it comes to AI and and technology more broadly, uh, when it comes to kids, yeah. Do you, what do you think about most? What's most critical, and I'm curious to hear also from the point of view of the corporate side of of your role today. What is companies, uh, you know, role versus the government. Sure, so governments around the world are really focused on kids right now in a way that we haven't actually seen in quite some time. Um, so and the focus is really around social media and the impact on kids, and you're seeing globally outside of the United States the adoption of laws that companies really do need to pay attention to and are paying attention to. And the reason why I say outside of the United States is there's this little thing, the First Amendment, that sort of has. Tied up some of the laws that are that the governments are trying to adopt that said, from a company perspective, what we need to make sure is that we provide parents, moms, dads with the tools so that they can help their kids navigate this space and also can protect their kids from whatever content they're able to control. It's a challenging space because at the same time you want to enable kids to learn about a digital technology. You want them to engage because this is their future digital technology. So there's a balance that needs to be struck, and I think that a lot of jurisdictions are doing that and a lot of governments, so a lot of governments are doing. that and companies are really trying to enable that kind of balance. So if you go back a ways I know you brought up social media and some of the risks and concerns there but um we saw regulators um trying to to catch up when it came to social media, when it came to mobile to those technological transformations. Do you feel like with the advent of AI, um, there's a little bit more of a preemptive thought being given to some of the potential issues? There was absolutely and I'd say, you know, particularly around the EU AI Act and some other very immersive comprehensive laws dealing with AI, the governments were saying, look, we missed the boat on social media, so we need to get out in front. We need to regulate. And I think there's now a recognition that there's a need to take an examination, really take a step back. This is by governments that are saying let's make sure that these laws can be implemented by companies across the spectrum. We want to enable startups. We want to enable innovation, and so I think that that is what is starting this initiative that you're seeing around what I talked about before. Simplification, harmonization, so it isn't so complicated going from privacy to responsible AI to digital safety. Let's bring them together in a way that will work a little bit better for the small and medium enterprises, but it did begin, I think you're right, when governments thought, gee, I think we missed the boat on social media. Do, do you feel like the um this kind of these opposing forces, um, because on the one hand. Obviously there's this AI arms race, um, you can't slow down progress. I know there was in in the US this sort of movement to like take a six month pause on AI progress which is not gonna happen um but you know on the one hand you have that right? you've got. At this this push to keep advancing and um and and there is this race going on on the other hand so many potential issues that are being thought through um how do you thread that needle like these are opposing forces. What are the different approaches to making sure that on the company level by the way that you can move forward, that you're not falling behind and at the same time you're being thoughtful? Yeah, I think that that's really important, especially for companies. I think it's really important that you know even before you. Start looking at regulations and whether and how you're going to comply to really create principles that that you as a company stand for. So at Microsoft, and I don't, we're not the only ones, but we were very early. You're a big one. We're a big one. We're big. Anybody heard of Microsoft in here? We are, we are big and because we're big and because we provide so much infrastructure to the governments and companies around the world, we really take these responsibilities pretty seriously and so what we had to do early early on before any AI laws were adopted, we created internal standards and that's where you as a company can say. Are we living up to our north star? What is our north star when it comes to making sure that we're trusted and we're trustworthy in terms of the AI that we're providing? And so we had a standard. We developed teams that would test against that standard. The standard included things like ensuring privacy, ensuring security. Security ensuring safety and fairness and making sure that the AI was inclusive, especially when it comes to accessibility issues. So those are pretty big requirements and we had teams that would make sure that we were abiding by that. We tested it was a very robust internal system. And we also published our standards so people could see it, so transparency was a big part of this too, and I think that that's the kind of responsibility that a company like Microsoft owes to our customers, which are also some very big companies and small and medium enterprises and startups, and what we also owe to our public sector customers as well. By the way, are you, are you surprised by the pace of Adoption. I mean, OpenAI's chat GPT, which Microsoft has a stake in, amassed 100 million users, subscribers within two months of its launch, fastest growing app ever. Did that surprise you? You've seen these other, you know, you've been a part of these other technological transformations. I have been. So when I was a commissioner of the US Federal Trade Commission, which, which was my last government role. Um, we used to see a lot of tech technological advances, and we felt like we were always behind. Now the pace of innovation is just accelerated. What used to take years to get out now takes months, and you know, regulators are trying to keep up. They're doing, you know, not a bad job in my view. And what we're seeing in companies. It is just to go to a point you made earlier, a real desire to be ahead, to be leaders, and also to make sure that it is safe and trusted, and that is a big job right now. But it is, but yes, things are moving incredibly quickly. Um, I wanna ask you also about the role of AI in productivity and in the impact, uh, to the workforce, um, and we talked a little bit about that yesterday as well and some of the opportunities, um, there's also uh a potential downside, right? There's a lot of concerns about what it does to jobs, um, you know, I think, I think we talk about it. A lot of like the superpower for employees which it absolutely can be. Can you talk a little bit about just how you look at the impact on the job force, the workforce, you know, both internally and externally, and how does that factor into how you think about the growth? Yeah, I think it's, it's really important to Understand that like here at this conference we have amazing people, amazing women who have been able to do incredible things with AI that I you know, listening to all of these panels I've just been blown away, um, that's a technical term for like really it's been awesome, um, and. At the same time I think it's important to think about the suite of of what's going to be happening particularly to women in the workforce as we go forward and that doesn't necessarily involve this cohort of women but sort of all women so what we are gonna. See is there jobs that are going to be augmented by AI they're going to be improved, you know, medical jobs of people who are in medicine, people who are in research, people who are doing pharmaceuticals, even the financial community. AI generative AI is just going to help them zoom ahead. There are those kinds of jobs we can think of as AI augmenting those roles, and then there are going to be jobs that are going to be disrupted. And you know that's going to be creative. We are, we know about that from what's what's happening in Hollywood. um we are also going to see that in administrative roles. We will see that in some sort of analytic roles, but not all of them. And as it turns out, so, uh, LinkedIn published some data and it got it out on International Women's Day. It turns out that women are going to be more impacted because they are, they take more and aspire to more of the jobs that will be disrupted than augmented and so what that means is it's really important for governments. And for companies to focus on how we can help women now get ready for that so that they just don't lose their jobs and then like they've got no place to go. So what does that mean? It means that we heard a lot about skilling uh over the last couple of days we absolutely need to focus on women in particular who are gonna need skilling and the jobs that that will be disrupted to help them get to that next level. There's also other things that companies can do, I think, to help with this in addition to skilling, and I should just note really quickly, Microsoft has already trained and skilled for AI about 100,000 people in Saudi and millions in just here, just here in Saudi Arabia, millions around the world, and by the end of this year we will hit about 160,000 in Saudi Arabia. Yeah, yeah, it's a big, but it's our responsibility, right? This is something that we can really help with and we partner with the government, we partner with our customers. It's really important to do skilling, but the other thing that companies can do super quick is you can, they can focus on their culture inside their companies to really drive AI training and all of that, and they can change the way they look at new new candidates for jobs. Think about the skills that people have, not their past experience. If you focus on skills, what you'll do is you'll increase by 13% the number of women that are considered for jobs globally. Well, um, Julie, I feel like we only scratched the surface, but as we said, really hefty topics, hopefully you'll be back, and it will be me interviewing you and not a bot or a humanoid, you know, robot so it will definitely be you, but thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Presenter: Romain Huet, Head, Developer Experience, OpenAI

Brainstorm AI 2024: OpenAI Demo

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Super thrilled to be here today. It's an interesting time in A I, the pace of change is really accelerating and there are more A I applications going from prototype to production every single day. I'm Roma and I lead developer experience at open and you know, a lot of people know us for Chad GPT. But in fact, our first product was the open API the ability for developers and for companies to take our A I models and bring them into their own products and services. And today, we are very fortunate to work with more than 3 million developers on the platform and 92% of Fortune Five Android actually use our products. So it's an amazing time to be all of us together and building in A I, you know, one of the favorite things in my role day to day is to work with amazing founders and companies who are pushing the envelope of these models every day and also showing them the art of the possible with what we, what we put out there in the world. So in that spirit, instead of having any presentation of slides today, let's jump to my laptop and take a look at some live demos. So first off at the remiss not to mention Sora, we just launched Sora this morning, our video generation model and it's now available on sora.com. Uh So what you're looking at here is the home page with features video already created in the last few hours by the community. Uh It's pretty amazing. In fact, we can fire off maybe a first uh video generation here. I'll say a golden retriever dressed as Santa on Christmas Day, you know, sounds pretty uh pretty cool. Um There is an enormous amount of demand at the moment for Sora. So sounds like uh you know, the service is already at capacity. That's OK, you can check it out later. Uh uh You know, and these are some of the beautiful videos that are already creating. Yeah. So now in fact, to show you something more concrete but with the wind to Sora, I'm going to bring here something about multi modality, multimodality is what we refer to as the ability for A I models to not just not just work with text, but also work with speech, with audio, with vision and also with video as you've seen with Sora. So I wanted to bring you here with a demo of how we can combine all of these modalities together to create something very unique. So this is the only part of the demo that is not live. This is describing a prompt as you can read on the screen in great detail about kind of the history of the German automotive automotive industry. And so if I click here, this is the video that came out of Sora. So what's pretty amazing here is that uh it's only about us switching together some themes out of Sora and adding a little bit of a soundtrack on top, but all of the images are untouched. This is straight out of the model. It's pretty magical. So now let's say we want to use such a video as a basis for a presentation. And what if we want to tell a story that this image, these images in this video can tell us. So what I'll do next is I'll click this button extract frames and I'll slice a few frames out of this video with A Z are generated. And now what I'll do next, I'll bring another modality of GPT photo, the ability to understand and extract insights from images or pictures and that's what we call vision. And so what I'll do next here is I'll keep this button and I'll take all of these six frames. I sliced out of the so video and I'll send them to GPT for all with vision to come up with a story. So don't blank, it goes fast. There we go. So every single time this is unique again, this is all happening in real time as we speak. So now out of these few frames, we were able to come up with that story. So this could be, for instance, the narration for a, for a documentary or this could be something that you can adapt to your own use cases and industries. But next, what if we were to bring this to life? What if we were to be able to bring a voice onto that uh that narration? Now, I'm sure some of you are already thinking ahead here. So what I'll do next is I'll click here to create a voice over and we now have amazing voices in our api like preset voices and they are much more expressive. We'll see that in a minute with the, with the next demo. But here, I also wanted to show you a preview of our voice engine model. The voice engine model is the ability to take a short sample of a voice and turn it into a voice you can use in your apps. So this is only available to trusted partners for now. And we are actively testing this West Dem. We obviously take safety very seriously. We wanted to show you a quick preview of what that would look like. So I'll go ahead and here, I'm going to record a few seconds of my voice. I'm extremely excited to be on stage at the Fortune brainstorm A I conference today and all I need is a few more seconds and I think we should be good to go for me to actually narrate this beautiful video that Sora created. All right. So now that this is so I'll go ahead record it right there. I can just send the script that we created before. Now send this little sample to our voice engine and we'll see how all of these can be combined together to create something a little unique here. So in a second, we should see that exact same video in the heart of the German automotive industry. But now narrated, Rily assemble the machine that would do one more modality that you can play with, right? And every bolt secures the legacy of engineering precision and innovation. Next, I could also do translation. So as you can hear from my French accent, I can maybe also narrated in French. So I'll go ahead and click French here, commitment to quality and efficiency setting. And now this is me narrating this video in French. And last but not least another modality that you can now tap into from our multimodal A I model is the ability to bring the speech to text as well. So here for since most of you don't speak French, but I can actually turn on the caps and all of a sudden you have this other modality of speaking text available. So this is just one example of how you can combine these multi modal models like GPT photo to create something very unique that you can adapt to your own businesses and products and services. But next, I want to show you something else about real time and our real time api so, first of all, here, how many of you in the room have tried Chad GPT with the advanced voice mode before? Wow. Quite a few of you. That's awesome. Well, you know, one question that we've heard so many times over the past few months has been, how can I bring these exact same experiences into my own products into my own services, whether it's to re invent customer service at scale or if it's about like a new way to interface with products? Well, here what I'm going to show you is a loop, sneak peek behind the scenes. So this is the open eye playground. So this is where developers and builders start their journey with our models. And so here I can start a session at any time and actually engage to start to have a feel for how the real time api in the speech to speech capabilities of GPT F come to life. So let's try that. Hi there. Hello there. How can I assist you today? Yeah, I'm on stage at the Fortune Prince, Tommy I conference. Could you welcome the attendees for me? Welcome everyone to the fortune brainstorm A I, so I like how you started, but I think I want you to bring more energy, more enthusiasm and don't forget people watching on the live stream. Welcome everyone to the Fortune Brainstorm A I conference at the Fabulous Saint Regis Hotel in San Francisco. To our incredible attendees and viewers online prepare for an inspiring and groundbreaking event as we dive into the future of A I. Um Now, could you whisper with a very low voice? A secret about San Francisco that maybe only the true locals could know like very, very low like subscription. Did you know that underneath San Francisco's bustling streets? There's a hidden network of tunnels. I did not know that these tunnels were used during prohibition to transport liquor. Discreetly, it's a little known secret. So as you can see the ability to interrupt the model at any time, the ability to jump back and generate intonations, all of that is at your disposal to create amazing ways to interface between your brand, your product and your own customers. Maybe one last example here, I have a test for you here. So here is the deal. I'm going to speak to you in three different languages and I'd like you to speak back to me with those same three languages mixed up. Does that sound good? Absolutely. I'm ready for the challenge. Let's hear it. All right. Chow, Pala Italiano, Francais de Christian stage and I can switch back to English at any time. Your turn. Chow Franci and I'm switching to English now. It's a pleasure to mix these languages on stage with you. So this is the kind of power now you have with these multi modal abilities for speech to speech. And here one example, for instance is that if you want to imagine what that could look like briefly, well, this is what you can do. You can now have voice as a modality to interface with new keyboards. What if I were to say, hey, can you show me on the map where we are? Sure here's Paris, a beautiful city with rich history. I'd like to see amazing Christmas decorations when I'm there. Can you show us a few examples? To me, here are some spots in Paris with amazing Christmas decorations. Galerie Lafayette, the Champs Elysees. This is one way you can imagine how we'll be able to re invent computer to human interfaces in the future with multi modality. And of course, this is not the only paradigm shift that we are excited about because we have also launched the one series of models that can now attack very complex task with reasoning. And we strongly believe that reasoning plus multi modality combined will unleash A I agents next year. And so we're extremely excited about these two paradigm shifts. Thank you so much for your time and I can't wait to see what you build. Thank you.

OpenAI

OpenAI in Fortune Rankings

Videos