OpenAI
OpenAI began as a non-profit AI safety research organisation in 2015, funded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and others. It restructured into a "capped-profit" model in 2019 and has since raised more than $17 billion, primarily from Microsoft. Its trajectory — from safety-focused research lab to the most commercially aggressive AI company in the world — is one of the defining organisational stories of the AI era. OpenAI controls ChatGPT, the most widely used AI application in history, and GPT-4o and the o-series reasoning models, which set the technical frontier benchmark for general-purpose language tasks. Its governance crisis in November 2023, when the board briefly fired CEO Sam Altman before reinstating him under investor pressure, exposed the structural tensions between safety commitments and commercial imperatives that define the field.
AI Models
o3
OpenAI's o3 model, announced in December 2024, represents a distinct architecture from the GPT series — it applies extended chain-of-thought reasoning at inference time, spending more compute per token to reason through complex problems. On the ARC-AGI benchmark, a test of novel problem-solving designed to resist memorisation, o3 achieved 87.5% — a score that significantly exceeded prior state of the art. o3 is the strongest publicly available model for mathematics, competitive programming, and scientific reasoning as of early 2025. It is also substantially more expensive to run than GPT-4o.
GPT-4o
OpenAI's flagship multimodal model, released in May 2024. The "o" stands for "omni" — it processes text, audio, and images in a single unified architecture rather than routing through separate models. On standard professional benchmarks it matches GPT-4 Turbo while responding significantly faster and at lower API cost. GPT-4o is the model powering ChatGPT for the majority of users and is the reference point for enterprise AI capability benchmarking in 2024.