OpenAI: What It Is and What It Makes
OpenAI is the most influential AI company in the world right now. Here is who they are, what they build, and what Canadians pay to use it.
Who Is OpenAI?
OpenAI is an AI research company based in San Francisco. Founded in 2015, originally as a non-profit. Now a capped-profit company with a non-profit controlling shareholder — a structure that was controversial but kept the non-profit's control in place after the Sam Altman drama of 2023.
Major investors: Microsoft ($13B+), SoftBank, Thrive Capital, others. Microsoft gets preferential access to OpenAI's models and uses them across Azure and Office.
CEO: Sam Altman. He was briefly fired by the board in November 2023 and reinstated days later after most employees threatened to leave. The board that fired him resigned. OpenAI has been reorganizing toward a more conventional for-profit structure since then.
What OpenAI Makes
- ChatGPT — the AI chatbot. Most-used AI product in the world. Free tier and paid tiers ($20 USD/month Plus, $200 USD/month Pro).
- GPT-4o and o3 — the underlying models. GPT-4o handles most tasks; o3 is a reasoning model for complex problems.
- DALL-E 3 — AI image generation, built into ChatGPT Plus.
- Sora — AI video generation, available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers.
- Whisper — open-source speech recognition model, free to download and run.
- OpenAI API — developers pay per token to use GPT models in their own apps.
- Operator — an AI agent that browses websites and completes tasks autonomously.
Canadian Pricing (in CAD)
Add provincial tax to these numbers. Ontario adds 13% HST. Alberta adds 5% GST. See the full CAD pricing table for all provinces.
OpenAI and Canada
OpenAI has no Canadian office. Their servers are primarily in the United States, run on Microsoft Azure infrastructure.
When you use ChatGPT, your data is processed on US servers. OpenAI's privacy policy commits them to GDPR compliance for EU users and general data protection principles. Canadian users fall under PIPEDA.
By default, OpenAI uses your conversations to train future models. You can opt out in Settings → Data Controls → "Improve the model for everyone." This setting persists across sessions.
The Sam Altman Situation (What Happened)
In November 2023, the OpenAI board fired CEO Sam Altman without warning. No clear public explanation was given. Within 5 days, over 700 of OpenAI's 770 employees signed a letter saying they would quit and follow Altman to Microsoft if he wasn't reinstated.
He was reinstated. The board members who fired him resigned. The whole episode raised questions about OpenAI's governance structure — questions that still haven't been fully resolved.
OpenAI is now moving toward a conventional for-profit company structure, which would reduce the non-profit's control. This was a condition of SoftBank's investment.
OpenAI vs the Competition
OpenAI has the most users, the most brand recognition, and the most product integrations. They are not always the technical leader. Anthropic's Claude models often outperform GPT-4o on writing and reasoning benchmarks. Google's Gemini leads on multimodal tasks. Meta's Llama is the leading open-source model.
OpenAI's advantage is distribution. ChatGPT has 200M+ weekly users. That lead compounds through data and product feedback loops.
Bottom Line
OpenAI makes the most-used AI products in the world. ChatGPT Free is a good starting point — the free tier is genuinely capable. ChatGPT Plus (~$28 CAD/month) makes sense if you use AI daily and want image and video generation alongside the chat.
Opt out of model training in settings if privacy matters to you.