What is the difference between AI and OpenAI?

AI is a field of study. OpenAI is a company that works in that field. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the branch of computer science that builds systems which learn from data, reason about it, and act on it. OpenAI is one organization among many that builds such systems, and it is best known for ChatGPT, the GPT family of language models, and the OpenAI API that developers use to add those models to their own software.

The two names look similar, which is why the question comes up so often. AI is the discipline, and OpenAI is one of the organizations that practice it.

What AI means

AI covers every technique that lets a computer perform a task we normally associate with human thinking. That includes recognizing a face in a photo, translating a sentence, recommending a film, driving a car, and writing a paragraph of text.

Inside the field there are several subfields. Machine learning trains a model on examples instead of writing rules by hand. Natural language processing handles text and speech. Computer vision handles images and video. Robotics connects all of these to physical machines.

AI is not owned by anyone. Universities, governments, open-source communities, and thousands of companies do AI research and build AI products. Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Anthropic, and OpenAI are all participants in the same field.

What OpenAI is

OpenAI is an AI research and product company based in San Francisco. It started as a nonprofit research lab and later added a for-profit arm so it could raise capital and sell products. Its stated mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence, meaning AI that matches or exceeds human ability across most tasks, benefits all of humanity.

Its main products are ChatGPT, a chat application used by consumers and businesses, the GPT series of large language models, image and speech models, and an API that lets developers call those models from their own code. Microsoft is its largest commercial partner and offers OpenAI's models through the Azure cloud.

So when someone asks "what is OpenAI", the short answer is: a company that builds and sells AI models and applications. When someone asks "what is AI", the answer is: the whole scientific and engineering field that OpenAI operates in.

AI vs OpenAI: comparison table

"Open AI" as in open-source, versus the company name

Some searches write "open AI" as two words, and that phrase has a second meaning. Open AI, or open-source AI, describes models whose weights are published so that anyone can download, run, and modify them. Meta's Llama models and the models from Mistral are common examples. The opposite is closed AI, where the model runs only on the provider's servers and you access it through an application or an API.

The company OpenAI, one word, mostly offers closed models. Its flagship models are served through ChatGPT and the API, and their weights are not published. The company has released some open-weight models, but its main business is hosted access. The name therefore describes the company's original intent to share research, not the license of its current products.

OpenAI vs generative AI

Generative AI is another term people mix with OpenAI. Generative AI is the subfield of AI that produces new content, such as text, images, audio, and code, rather than only classifying existing data. Large language models are the best known example.

OpenAI is a company that builds generative AI products. So "OpenAI vs generative AI" is again a company against a category. Every generative AI product from OpenAI is generative AI, but most generative AI in the world is built by other people.