Global Illumination

Global Illumination was a digital product company based in New York City. The company was founded in 2021 by Thomas Dimson, Taylor Gordon, and Joey Flynn. Global Illumination has designed and built products at Instagram and Facebook and made contributions to YouTube, Google, Pixar, Riot Games, among other notable companies.

The company also developed an open-source sandbox MMORPG built for the web called Biomes, which has a graphic resemblance to the popular video game Minecraft. In the game, users collect, craft, build, and trade with others and create blockchains for players, incentivizing players to be creative in their problem-solving.

In August of 2023, it was announced that Global Illumination was acquired by OpenAI for an undisclosed amount. According to the announcement, the team of Global Illumination joined OpenAI, where they will work on OpenAI's core products, which includes ChatGPT. The fate of the company's game, Biomes, was not remarked on, although some suggest the acquisition of Global Illumination would be aimed toward enhancing OpenAI's Dall-E 2 image generation service.