ChatGPT remains to be the leading AI writing platform to date. With a solid user base of over 100 million, this AI chatbot is the closest you can get to a human writer. It doesn’t only write your paper, essay, or blog; it also delivers conversational lines and injects humor in its prompts. But who owns ChatGPT? Despite the humor about ChatGPT being Microsoft’s brainchild, the platform is still very much owned by one company. Read on to find out. 

Who owns ChatGPT?

In a nutshell, OpenAI owns ChatGPT. OpenAI is a research laboratory established by the business tycoon Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and other prominent figures in 2015. The current CEO of OpenAI is Sam Altman, who is behind ChatGPT’s success. 

What is OpenAI? 

AI research lab

OpenAI started as a general AI research and development laboratory that created generative pre-trained systems like DALL-E and ChatGPT. DALL-E is an AI technology that generates realistic images from any text prompt. Meanwhile, ChatGPT is a language model trained on deep learning and generates human-like, conversational text from prompts. OpenAI has released three ChatGPT models, such as GPT-2, 3, and 4, since it was introduced in the last few years. 

Another OpenAI brainchild is Whisper, a speech recognition model that lets you transcribe, identify, and translate almost 100 languages. 

ChatGPT has since blown out of proportion when it was introduced on November 30, 2022. Since its inception, many writers have questioned their place in their respective industries. Most companies have also utilized ChatGPT for mass writing production, with the help of human creatives. 

However, ChatGPT also faced scrutiny a few months after it was invented. It has been rumored to create false information, hence the creation of AI writing detectors like GPTZero

Does Elon Musk own ChatGPT?

Although Elon Musk founded OpenAI with Sam Altman, the now ex-Twitter CEO claims he doesn’t own ChatGPT shares. While he helped fund the mother company, OpenAI, Musk left its Board of Directors in 2018. He claims there was a conflict of interest, and his priority was his two businesses, Tesla and SpaceX. 

Why did Elon Musk leave OpenAI? 

business tycoon

Although the business juggernaut emphasized his focus on Tesla and SpaceX, there might be another truth to the story. According to some unnamed sources, Musk tried to take over OpenAI since it had lagged behind Google. However, CEO Sam Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman rejected his proposal.

After Musk’s proposal was rejected, he cut off all financial ties, including the promise of funding OpenAI with $1 billion over the next few years. 

Does Microsoft own ChatGPT?

Despite the rapid integration of ChatGPT in many industries, many have questioned concerns about its public use. For instance, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak signed an open letter explaining the dangers of GPT-4, calling for a pause in its development. 

Twitter

Some experts are concerned about the rapid development of AI technologies, especially with Microsoft’s recent $10 billion investment in OpenAI. This tandem could reach the pinnacle of AI supremacy, possibly replacing 80 percent of human jobs. 

open letter to pause AI development

Despite the rumors about Microsoft owning ChatGPT or OpenAI, both companies have only been partners since 2016. Microsoft remains the company’s largest investor. In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion into the research lab. Then came the $10 billion investment after ChatGPT’s and OpenAI’s successful products. 

What is ChatGPT? 

ChatGPT stands for Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer. It’s a large language model chatbot, launched on November 30, 2022, developed by OpenAI. 

ChatGPT is the most advanced AI chatbot that can start a conversation based on the user’s desired length, format, tone, style, and language. Users enter a text prompt called prompt engineering to steer conversations. These conversations are powered by GPT-3.5 or GPT-4.

The AI chatbot is freely available for all users and operates a freemium version. However, users may opt to upgrade to ChatGPT Plus. ChatGPT was the fastest-growing AI chatbot that garnered over 100 million users within two months. 

What makes ChatGPT special?

Despite concerns of ChatGPT fueling misinformation and enabling plagiarism, it remains the most impressive chatbot to date. The AI writer produces human-like replies based on the amount of data it’s trained on. 

Another factor that makes ChatGPT special is how it logs context from users’ previous messages. The intelligent chatbot uses these messages in a thread and creates replies according to the former messages in the later part of the conversation. 

ChatGPT is one of the fastest-growing AI-powered chatbots that has grown in popularity over the months. To give you perspective, it took TikTok more or less nine months to reach 100 million users, while Instagram took two and a half years. Meanwhile, ChatGPT only took two months to reach 100 million users. January 31 was the most significant day for ChatGPT, garnering 28 million website visits. 

Is ChatGPT a private company? 

AI writer

ChatGPT’s owner, OpenAI, started as a nonprofit company in 2015. However, it opened a for-profit entity in 2019.

Can you buy shares in ChatGPT?

Since ChatGPT isn’t a listed company, investors can’t buy shares in OpenAI or its product ChatGPT. 

Who founded OpenAI?

OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Sam Altman and Elon Musk, the initial board members. The rest of the co-founders are Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy, Vicki Cheung, Jessica Livingston, Pamela Vagata, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba. 

What can you do with ChatGPT?

ChatGPT can create blog outlines, generate creative writing, provide personal recommendations, and automate customer service. 

What are ChatGPT’s limitations?

ChatGPT sometimes writes incorrect and nonsensical answers. The AI writer also has limited knowledge of events after September 2021. The platform also suffers from algorithmic bias, including responses about descriptions of people. In one prompt, ChatGPT generated text explaining white male scientists were superior to women and scientists of color. 

How much is ChatGPT Plus? 

The premium version, ChatGPT Plus, costs $20 a month. Although this service is still “experimental,” it promises no downtime, access to new features, access during peak periods, and faster response speeds.