OpenAI celebrates 10 years of existence — but how has it lived up to its promise of AGI which 'benefits all of humanity'?
The tech company is now front and center in the generative AI race - but how did it get there?
· TechRadarFeatures By Ross Kelly published 21 February 2026
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OpenAI quietly sprung onto the scene 10 years ago, but it would be waiting a while before its meteoric rise to prominence.
The pioneering AI company was founded as a non-profit organization in December 2015 by a consortium of tech industry figures, which included Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and Greg Brockman among others.
Initially co-chaired by Musk and Altman, the company's stated aims were to drive the safe and responsible development of artificial general intelligence (AGI).
“OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity,” the OpenAI charter reads.
“We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome.”
In the intervening years between its foundation and the iconic release of ChatGPT in 2022, the company quietly worked away in the background. Its first ‘official’ launch was a public beta for ‘OpenAI Gym’, a developer tool for comparing reinforcement learning algorithms.
While Microsoft is now among its biggest backers, one of its earliest was Nvidia.
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