SAN FRANCISCO, July 5 — For communities across Asia watching the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, the story of OpenAI is one that touches on both promise and questions about access. The organisation, founded in December 2015 as a non-profit by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and others, has grown from a research lab into a major force shaping how people around the world interact with AI. What this means for ordinary families in the region is becoming clearer.
OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, and within months, students in Manila, small business owners in Jakarta, and educators in Bangkok were using it for everything from homework help to drafting marketing copy. The tool, built on the GPT-3 language model released in 2020, brought conversational AI into millions of homes.
A more powerful version, GPT-4, followed in March 2023.
A shift in funding and structure
OpenAI began as a non-profit research organisation, but in 2019 it adopted what it calls a ‘capped-profit’ model. That same year, Microsoft invested $1 billion in the company. In 2023, Microsoft put in an additional $10 billion.
These investments signal how deeply big tech is tying its future to AI — and for people in developing economies, that raises questions about who ultimately controls the tools they are coming to rely on. Closer to home, the competitive landscape is crowded.
Google, through its DeepMind subsidiary — founded in 2010 and acquired in 2014 — developed AlphaGo in 2016 and LaMDA in 2021, and released Bard in 2023. Meta released its own large language model, LLaMA, in February 2023. Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers including Dario Amodei, focuses on AI safety and released Claude in 2023.
These are not distant Silicon Valley stories; they shape the AI products that reach Asian markets.
Other players and a long history
The field is not new. Amazon has Alexa, Apple has Siri, and IBM released Watson as far back as 2011. Academic institutions like Stanford University and MIT continue to contribute foundational research.
The U.S. government, through DARPA, has funded artificial intelligence research since the 1960s. For families across the region, this means the AI tools they use today rest on decades of work — much of it far from public view.
What matters for communities is not just the technology but who benefits. OpenAI’s transition from non-profit to capped-profit model, and its deep ties to Microsoft, reflect a broader trend: the AI tools reaching Asian households are increasingly shaped by corporate priorities. The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 changed everyday expectations.
People now expect their apps to talk back, to help write, to generate ideas.
Looking ahead
As 2026 progresses, the question for many across Asia is whether these powerful AI systems will remain accessible and affordable. OpenAI and its rivals continue to develop new capabilities, but the cost of running these models — and the data centres they require — is enormous. For families in the region, the next chapter of this story will be written not just in San Francisco boardrooms, but in how these tools are priced, localised, and made available in languages beyond English.
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