Sam Altman

Like we have been a misunderstood and badly mocked org for a long time.

Like when we started, we like announced the org at the end of 2015 and said, we're going to work on AGI.

Like people thought we were batshit insane.

You know, like I, I remember at the time, a eminent AI scientist at a,

large industrial AI lab was like DMing individual reporters being like, you know, these people aren't very good and it's ridiculous to talk about AGI and I can't believe you're giving them time of day.

And it's like, that was the level of like pettiness and rancor in the field at a new group of people saying we're going to try to build AGI.

We don't get mocked as much now.

How did it stand?

We started as a nonprofit.

We learned early on that we were going to need far more capital than we were able to raise as a nonprofit.

Our nonprofit is still fully in charge.

There is a subsidiary capped profit so that our investors and employees can earn a certain fixed return.

And then beyond that, everything else flows to the nonprofit.

And the nonprofit is like in voting control, lets us make a bunch of nonstandard decisions, can cancel equity, can do a whole bunch of other things, can let us merge with another org, protects us from making decisions that are not in any like shareholder's interest.

So I think as a structure, it has been important to a lot of the decisions we've made.

It was really like,

To do what we needed to go do, we had tried and failed enough to raise the money as a nonprofit.

We didn't see a path forward there.

So we needed some of the benefits of capitalism, but not too much.

I remember at the time someone said, you know, as a nonprofit, not enough will happen.