OpenAI
The AI company behind ChatGPT, GPT-4, and the DALL·E image generation models. Founded in 2015, it catalyzed mainstream AI adoption with ChatGPT's launch in November 2022 — reaching 100 million users in two months, faster than any consumer product in history. Heavily backed by Microsoft, which has integrated OpenAI models across its product suite. OpenAI and Anthropic are the two primary competitors in the frontier AI model market.
In practice
OpenAI makes GPT-4 and ChatGPT — the most widely used AI products before and alongside Claude. For builders evaluating AI options, OpenAI and Anthropic are the two most common API choices. ChatGPT is to OpenAI what Claude.ai is to Anthropic — the consumer chat product built on top of their underlying model.
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