When OpenAI started, it took four and a half years before it had its first product.

True: the gap between OpenAI's founding (announced December 2015) and its first product (as commonly identified, e.g., the OpenAI API released in June 2020) is about 4.5 years (roughly 4.25-4.75 years). Mostly true: the gap is about 4-5 years, or the result depends on a reasonable alternative reading of 'first product'. Mostly false: OpenAI released something widely recognised as a product much earlier (e.g., under 3.5 years), so the figure is a substantial distortion. False: the gap is clearly far from 4.5 years under any reasonable definition.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 Introducing OpenAI | OpenAI OpenAI · 11 December 2015

   “OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”

2. E2 OpenAI API OpenAI · 11 June 2020

   “We’re releasing an API for accessing new AI models developed by OpenAI.”

3. E3 Organizational update from OpenAI OpenAI · 29 December 2020

   “In May, we introduced GPT‑3—the most powerful language model to date—and soon afterward launched our first commercial product, an API to safely access artificial intelligence models using simple, natural-language prompts.”

4. E4 OpenAI Gym Beta OpenAI · 27 April 2016

   “We’re releasing the public beta of OpenAI Gym, a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms.”

OpenAI announced itself as a non-profit research company on 2015-12-11 (E1). It released its API on 2020-06-11 (E2), and a later OpenAI update calls that API its "first commercial product" (E3). That is a gap of about 4.5 years. E4 shows that OpenAI released a public beta of OpenAI Gym, a toolkit for reinforcement learning research, in April 2016, while E3 identifies the 2020 API as OpenAI's first commercial product. So the claim falls within the 4.25–4.75 year range in the criteria.