Sarah Hirshander

I think we would have to start back in 2015.

So that's when OpenAI started.

OpenAI began as a nonprofit.

It began as this nonprofit AI lab founded by a few donors, including some extremely familiar names like Elon Musk and Sam Altman.

And they founded it as a nonprofit to develop AI in a way that is safe and that will benefit humanity.

And they created it as a nonprofit lab instead of as a corporation or as like a for-profit startup, which is normally what we would see for this kind of thing, because they figured that this technology was going to be so transformative that we need to make sure there's no profit motive involved.

So nobody is going to make money off of what we're making.

That was 2015.

Fast forward a few years and AI starts getting a lot of buzz because of a new product called ChatGPT that OpenAI, the nonprofit lab, developed.

So over time, OpenAI was saying, you know, we need a lot more money to be able to do this properly.

It costs a lot of money to develop AI.

It costs money to, like, hire people.

The computing power, all of it costs a lot of money.

So, like, we need investors.

We can't just rely on donations and sort of the tax breaks that we get as a nonprofit to develop this stuff.

And so they created this like what's called like a capped profit subsidiary, which was like a little for profit arm that they could use to raise that money.

It would still be under the control of the nonprofit as kind of like the umbrella parent organization.

But they were able to raise some money to some extent.

A lot more money started pouring in, a lot more interest from investors started pouring in, and OpenAI was kind of struggling to reconcile the nonprofit part of their mission and the fact that they were becoming this enormous, one of the most well-known tech companies in the country.

So...