Karen Hao

And of course, now they're

You could argue one of the most capitalistic companies in the world.

They have raised more money from private markets than pretty much any company ever.

And they are just about to prepare for an IPO later this year that could value them at something like a trillion dollars.

I think the problem with these organizations, because it's not just OpenAI, it's also Anthropic, XAI, all of these AI startups, they intermingle mission with capitalism.

So there's such a culture within Silicon Valley that doesn't really distinguish capitalism from social good.

They believe that the markets drive the best socially good outcome.

And so when they started, they...

intended to create something that would actually beat Google.

That was the way that they defined it internally.

Google was the only game in town that was really dominating AI development.

They did not like that.

They wanted to create some kind of competing lab that would supersede Google quickly.

Google was a for profit.

So it was a good story to create a nonprofit and recruit a bunch of researchers to something that appeared fundamentally different.

But the reason why they now look very similar to, you could say, what Google looked like before it became a public company, which is just a normal corporate entity that is trying to amass an extraordinary monopoly.

is that once they got the talent and the mission had served its narrative purpose, then they just needed money and they needed to figure out a way to raise that amount of money.

So they created a for-profit vehicle that became the priority and essentially consumed the rest of the nonprofit.

So when they created the for-profit vehicle, Musk and Altman had disagreements over who should be the CEO of this new for-profit.

They're such retiring characters.