What is OpenAI?

OpenAI is the company behind ChatGPT and the GPT model family — the startup that set off the modern AI boom when ChatGPT launched in late 2022. It started in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab; today it is a Sam Altman-led commercial juggernaut with hundreds of millions of weekly users.

As of July 2026, the headline product is the GPT-5.6 family, which hit general availability on July 9, 2026. It comes in three sizes — GPT-5.6 Sol (the big one), Terra (mid-size), and Luna (small and cheap) — replacing the old one-model-fits-all approach with pick-your-price tiers. Beyond chat, OpenAI ships the Codex coding agent, image and voice models, and an API that a huge share of AI apps are built on.

The money is as dramatic as the tech. In March 2026 OpenAI closed a $122 billion round — the largest private fundraise ever — at an $852 billion valuation, with Amazon investing $50 billion and AWS becoming its exclusive enterprise cloud partner. That deal put GPT-5.6 on Amazon Bedrock from day one.

Worth knowing: OpenAI is no longer the runaway leader it was in 2023. Anthropic, Google, and fast-moving Chinese labs now trade benchmark wins with it release by release — which is exactly why the model names keep coming so fast.