OpenAI

OpenAI is the frontier AI lab whose conspicuous absence this spoke needed to fix — the proprietary, closed-weight counterweight to the open-weight wave (open-weight-models). Source: Wikipedia (landscape background; pricing/rankings are volatile — see llm-api-pricing/llm-benchmarks).

Models & deployment

• GPT series (GPT-3 → GPT-5.2 → GPT-5.6) and the o-series reasoning models (o1, o3) — plus multimodal DALL·E / Sora / Whisper. All proprietary / closed-weight. (Whisper’s open-weight STT release is paged in speech-audio-wiki — the exception to the “all closed” rule.)
• GPT-5.6 (rolling out 2026-07, staggered at the Trump administration’s request) ships as three named flavors (openai-gpt56-grok45-clash): Sol (flagship; stronger agentic coding/biology/cybersecurity), Terra (everyday work), and Luna (speed + affordability). The tiering makes OpenAI’s capability-vs-cost split explicit inside one family, and Luna puts token economy front-and-centre — the cost-per-task turn now shows up in OpenAI’s own lineup.
• Astra — the announced-but-unreleased “next major model” (named 2026-08-01). Introduced not in a launch post but in a mathematics publication crediting an internal version with ten results in maths and TCS, each shipped as a Lean certificate (ten-proofs). Nothing published on params, context, pricing, benchmarks or date; the only quantity is a ~$2,000 token cost quoted at Sol rates, i.e. in GPT-5.6’s currency because Astra has none. Whether it succeeds GPT-5.6 or sits beside it is unstated.
• Access via paid usage-based API, ChatGPT tiers (Plus ~$20/mo, Pro ~$200/mo), and enterprise deals.

Why it anchors the landscape

• Frontier incumbent: ChatGPT (Nov 2022) “credited with catalyzing the AI boom,” the fastest-growing consumer app in history — the premium-reasoning pole the “does the frontier premium survive?” tension is measured against.
• The de-facto API standard: “OpenAI’s API has become a de-facto interoperability standard” — the shape challengers like deepseek deliberately conform to (OpenAI-compatible) to erase switching costs.
• Microsoft partnership: >$13B invested, exclusive Azure compute, Copilot/Office integration.

Related

llm-provider · llm-api-pricing · llm-benchmarks · open-weight-models · deepseek · google · anthropic · xai-grok · openai-gpt56-grok45-clash · astra