OpenAI is an AI company based in San Francisco, founded in 2015 as a non-profit organisation. Since its restructuring in October 2025, it has consisted of the non-profit OpenAI Foundation, which controls the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC (as of October 2026). OpenAI is best known for ChatGPT and the GPT language models, as well as the DALL·E image generator and the Whisper speech recognition model. Its models are offered through apps and an API.
ChatGPT is an AI assistant from the US company OpenAI, released in November 2022, which brought generative AI to a broad audience. It is based on large language models from the GPT series and answers questions, writes and edits texts, summarises documents and helps with programming. ChatGPT is available in the browser and as an app, in free and paid tiers as well as versions for teams and enterprises.
GPT (generative pre-trained transformer) refers to a series of large language models developed by OpenAI and based on the transformer architecture. The models are first pre-trained on vast amounts of text to predict the next token and then further trained for dialogue and following instructions. The first GPT model appeared in 2018; later generations underpin ChatGPT. In everyday speech, ‘GPT’ is often used for language models in general.
DALL-E is a series of image generation models from OpenAI that create images from text descriptions. The first version appeared in 2021; DALL-E 3 was integrated into ChatGPT in 2023 and made text-to-image generation accessible to a broad audience. OpenAI has since replaced DALL-E with newer image models from the GPT Image series; API access to DALL-E 2 and 3 ended in May 2026 (as of October 2026).
Whisper is an automatic speech recognition model released by OpenAI in September 2022. It converts spoken language in many languages into text and can also translate recordings into English. Its code and model weights are available under the open-source MIT licence, so Whisper can also run on your own hardware, an advantage when audio data should not leave the organisation. Typical uses include transcripts of meetings, interviews and subtitles.
