Elon Musk wasn’t only the founder and chief financial backer of OpenAI, but it turns out he’d also come up with the company’s name.
Emails from 2015 between Elon Musk and current OpenAI President Greg Brockman show that it was Musk who’d come up with the name ‘OpenAI’. Brockman had initially suggested the name ‘Cogito’ to the founding group. Ilya Sutskever, who became OpenAI’s Chief Scientist, had initially had his reservations about Cogito, not knowing what the word meant. Brockman later said that Cogito was already trademarked, and suggested the name “Consider”. Musk didn’t particularly like the name, and instead suggested the name “OpenAI”.
“A naming approach we could try is for the real name to be long, but have actual use be a contraction, eg the full name of SpaceX is Space Exploration Technologies Corp,” Musk told Greg Brockman in an email on 2nd December 2015. “We could call this the Open Al Institute (Open Al-I!), but call it Open in everyday conversation. Looks like OpenAl.com is available for purchase,” Musk added.
Brockman didn’t seem to be thrilled about OpenAI, and continued to push on Consider. “”re Consider. Its grown on me a lot as I’ve tried it out in various contexts, and think we could make it work pretty well. How down on it are you?” he asked Musk. Musk said that he wasn’t keen on it. “Consider sounds a bit nannyish and self-righteous,” he said.
By the next day, Brockman said that he was coming around on OpenAI. “Ok, I’m actually starting to feel pretty good about OpenaAl. Also polled a few people I trust, and all good reactions. I’ve called the owner of openai.com; working on him now. Branding-wise, I’m thinking we can call it “OpenAl” or “the OpenAl group”. (Because our ultimate goal is the combined engineering and research goal of AGI, I think we should avoid “institute” or “research institute” in our positioning.),” he said.
Musk agreed with Brockman about leaving Institute out of the name. “Yeah, good point about not sounding too researching..Just OpenAI is probably better,” he said. Interestingly, Musk seems to still have an aversion to pure research 10 years later and has just said that at xAI, his new AI company, the term researcher would be done away with, and everyone would just be called ‘engineer’.
It seems that everyone agreed with Musk — who was funding the project — and the founders decided to name their new company “OpenAI”. On 12th December 2015, OpenAI was unveiled to the world. But Musk, who came up with the name, would eventually leave the company in 2017 over disagreements over how it would raise funds. OpenAI, though, went on without Musk, and ended to releasing ChatGPT in 2022. Not long after, Elon Musk launched xAI, his own AI company to rival OpenAI. xAI is already doing quite well, and its Grok 4 model has performed better than OpenAI’s latest GPT-5 model on some benchmarks. But while Elon Musk’s big AI bet is now xAI, one of the other top labs in the fray still has an undeniable imprint of his early involvement.
Here is the full email chain, from 2nd December 2015 to 3rd December 2015. On 12th December 2015, OpenAI was finally unveiled to the world.
On Dec 2, 2015, at 8:45 PM, Greg Brockman wrote:
One update from me:
On name, there’s a potentially conflicting trademark on Cogito. What do you think of “Consider” (we can get consider.com and @consider for a reasonable price)? I like that its otherwise unbranded, has no negative connotations, and also points to our differentiator: we consider the impact of AGI.
gdb
On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 11:18 AM, Elon Musk wrote:
Don’t love the sound of Consider. What’s the Cogito trademark issue?
A naming approach we could try is for the real name to be long, but have actual use be a contraction, eg the full name of SpaceX is Space Exploration Technologies Corp.
We could call this the Open Al Institute (Open Al-I!), but call it Open in everyday conversation. Looks like OpenAl.com is available for purchase.
On Dec 3, 2015, at 8:30 PM, Greg Brockman wrote:
The relevant trademark is here: htto://www.trademarkia.com/cogito-79117 699.html (it’s for this product: htto://www.exoertsystem.com/cogito/).
And aww re Consider. Its grown on me a lot as I’ve tried it out in various contexts, and think we could make it work pretty well. (I had a similar experience with the name “Stripe”. At choosing time it felt pretty random, but because its otherwise so unbranded it started to feel more natural as time went on.) How down on it are you?
On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 11:37 AM, Elon Musk wrote:
Pretty down. Consider sounds a bit nannyish and self-righteous.
On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 11:53 AM, Greg Brockman wrote:
Ok, got it. Looks like there are a few things called OpenAIl (https://openai.org/, http://openai.sourceforge.net/), though nothing really established. I could get behind it if we can’t find anything else we like. Thinking…
FWIW, on the short name front, here’s a list of domains a friend-of-friend is selling/brokering:
[Redacted]
Nothing hugely stood out to me besides Consider though.
-gdb
On Dec 3, 2015, at 10:11 PM, Greg Brockman wrote:
Ok, I’m actually starting to feel pretty good about OpenaAl. Also polled a few people I trust, and all good reactions. I’ve called the owner of openai.com; working on him now. Branding-wise, I’m thinking we can call it “OpenAl” or “the OpenAl group”. (Because our ultimate goal is the combined engineering and research goal of AGI, I think we should avoid “institute” or “research institute” in our positioning.) I
could be convinced otherwise though.
On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 2:42 PM, Elon Musk wrote:
Yeah, good point about not sounding too researching. I mostly liked Institute, because it sounded like ayiyi as an acronym 🙂 Just OpenAl is probably better