OpenAI
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Credit - Florian Generotzky—laif/Redux
A year is a long time in the AI industry. In the last 12 months, OpenAI released not one but three generations of 'reasoning' models (which take time to analyze problems rather than giving an immediate answer) kicking off a new paradigm in AI research that many competitors raced to follow. The company—now one of the most valuable private companies in the world, with a $300 billion valuation—also launched its video-generation model, Sora, and integrated image generation into ChatGPT, sparking a viral social media trend. CEO Sam Altman, meanwhile, appeared at the White House in January as President Trump announced a $500 billion program to build the datacenters where OpenAI believes it will train 'superintelligence.' Perhaps sensing where the political winds were blowing, OpenAI relaxed restrictions on ChatGPT-generated images and responses, announcing it would allow more outputs that might be considered offensive. Altman has spent much of the year engaged in a controversial battle to restructure OpenAI as a for-profit company, and seeking to reduce its reliance on Microsoft, its main cloud computing provider. Amidst rapid technical change and the shifting tectonics of politics, Altman never dropped his relentlessly optimistic message. 'The fact that we're offering, great, aligned, safe, free, powerful AI to hundreds of millions of people every day, I think that's pretty cool,' he recently told TIME.
Write to Billy Perrigo at billy.perrigo@time.com.
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