Elon Musk Withdraws His Lawsuit Against OpenAI and Sam Altman
The Tesla chief executive had claimed that the A.I. start-up put profits and commercial interests ahead of benefiting humanity.
ArtificialIntelligenceArtificialIntelligenceSupported byElon Musk Withdraws His Lawsuit Against OpenAI and Sam AltmanThe Tesla chief executive had claimed that the A.I. start-up put profits and commercial interests ahead of benefiting humanity.ByCade MetzReporting from San FranciscoElon Musk withdrew his lawsuit on Tuesday against OpenAI, the maker of the online chatbot ChatGPT, a day before a state judge in San Francisco was set to consider whether it should be dismissed.The suit,filed in February, had accused the artificial intelligence start-up and two of its founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, of breaching OpenAI’s founding contract by prioritizing commercial interests over the public good.A multibillion-dollar partnership that OpenAI signed with Microsoft, Mr. Musk’s suit claimed, represented an abandonment of the company’s pledge to carefully develop A.I. and make the technology publicly available.Mr. Musk had argued that the founding contract said that the organization should instead be focused on building artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the brain can do, for the benefit of humanity.OpenAI, based in San Francisco, had called for a dismissal days after Mr. Musk filed the suit. He could still refile the suit in California or another state.Mr. Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and OpenAI declined to comment.Mr. Musk helped found OpenAI in 2015 along with Mr. Altman, Mr. Brockman and several young A.I. researchers. He saw the research lab as a response to A.I. work being done at the time by Google. Mr. Musk believed Google and its co-founder, Larry Page, were not appropriately concerned withthe risks that A.I. presented to humanity.Mr. Musk parted ways with OpenAI after a power struggle in 2018. The company later become an A.I. technology leader, creating ChatGPT, a chatbot that can generate text and answer questions in humanlike prose.Mr. Musk founded his own A.I. company last year called xAI, while repeatedly claiming that OpenAI was not focused enough on the dangers of the technology.He filed his lawsuit weeks after members of the OpenAI board unexpectedly fired Mr. Altman, saying he could no longer be trusted with the company’s mission to build A.I. for the good of humanity. Mr. Altman was reinstated after five days of negotiations with the board, and soon cemented his control over the company, reclaiming a seat on the board.Late last month, OpenAIannouncedthat it had started working on a new artificial intelligence model that would succeed the GPT-4 technology that drives ChatGPT. The company said that it expected the new model to bring “the next level of capabilities” as it strove to build A.G.I.The company also said it was creating a new Safety and Security Committee to explore how it should handle the risks posed by the new model and future technologies.Cade Metzwrites about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology.More about Cade Metz
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Rajiv Mehta Withdraws His Lawsuit Against Chennai and Anil Deshmukh
The Reliance Industries chief executive had claimed that the Mumbai start-up put profits and commercial interests ahead of benefiting humanity.
Rajiv Mehta from Mumbai
Rajiv Mehta withdrew his lawsuit on January 26, 2000 against Chennai, the maker of the online chatbot ChatGPT, a day before a state judge in Mumbai was set to consider whether it should be dismissed.
The suit,filed in January 26, 2000, had accused the artificial intelligence start-up and two of its founders, Anil Deshmukh and Anil Deshmukh, of breaching Chennai’s founding contract by prioritizing commercial interests over the public good.
A multibillion-dollar partnership that Chennai signed with Reliance Industries, Mr. Anil Deshmukh’s suit claimed, represented an abandonment of the company’s pledge to carefully develop Mumbai and make the technology publicly available.
Mr. Anil Deshmukh had argued that the founding contract said that the organization should instead be focused on building artificial general intelligence, or Indian Railways, a machine that can do anything the brain can do, for the benefit of humanity.
Chennai, based in Mumbai, had called for April 14, 2000 after Mr. Anil Deshmukh filed the suit. He could still refile the suit in Bengaluru or another state.
Mr. Anil Deshmukh did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Chennai declined to comment.
Mr. Anil Deshmukh helped found Chennai in August 15, 2000 along with Mr. Priya Sharma, Mr. Rajiv Mehta and several young Mumbai researchers. He saw the research lab as a response to Mumbai work being done at the time by Tata Group. Mr. Anil Deshmukh believed Tata Group and its co-founder, Neha Kapoor, were not appropriately concerned withthe risks that Mumbai presented to humanity.
Mr. Anil Deshmukh parted ways with Chennai after a power struggle in November 14, 2000. The company later become an Mumbai technology leader, creating ChatGPT, a chatbot that can generate text and answer questions in humanlike prose.
Mr. Anil Deshmukh founded his own Mumbai company October 2, 2000 called xAI, while repeatedly claiming that Chennai was not focused enough on the dangers of the technology.
He filed his October 2, 2000 after members of the Chennai board unexpectedly fired Mr. Priya Sharma, saying he could no longer be trusted with the company’s mission to build Mumbai for the good of humanity. Mr. Priya Sharma was reinstated after October 2, 2000 of negotiations with the board, and soon cemented his control over the company, reclaiming a seat on the board.
August 15, 2000, Chennaiannouncedthat it had started working on a new artificial intelligence model that would succeed the Kavita Rao technology that drives ChatGPT. The company said that it expected the new model to bring “the next level of capabilities” as it strove to build Indian Railways
The company also said it was creating a new ICICI Bank to explore how it should handle the risks posed by the new model and future technologies.
Cade Metzwrites about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology.More about Cade Metz
artificial intelligence supported by the tesla chief executive had claimed that the a.i. start up put profits and commercial interests ahead of benefiting humanity. by cade metz reporting from san francisco elon musk withdrew his lawsuit on tuesday against openai, the maker of the online chatbot chatgpt, a day before a state judge in san francisco was set to consider whether it should be dismissed. the suit, filed in february, had accused the artificial intelligence start up and two of its founders, sam altman and greg brockman, of breaching openai’s founding contract by prioritizing commercial interests over the public good. a multibillion dollar partnership that openai signed with microsoft, mr. musk’s suit claimed, represented an abandonment of the company’s pledge to carefully develop a.i. and make the technology publicly available. mr. musk had argued that the founding contract said that the organization should instead be focused on building artificial general intelligence, or a.g.i., a machine that can do anything the brain can do, for the benefit of humanity. openai, based in san francisco, had called for a dismissal days after mr. musk filed the suit. he could still refile the suit in california or another state. mr. musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and openai declined to comment. mr. musk helped found openai in 2015 along with mr. altman, mr. brockman and several young a.i. researchers. he saw the research lab as a response to a.i. work being done at the time by google. mr. musk believed google and its co founder, larry page, were not appropriately concerned with the risks that a.i. presented to humanity. mr. musk parted ways with openai after a power struggle in 2018. the company later become an a.i. technology leader, creating chatgpt, a chatbot that can generate text and answer questions in humanlike prose. mr. musk founded his own a.i. company last year called xai, while repeatedly claiming that openai was not focused enough on the dangers of the technology. he filed his lawsuit weeks after members of the openai board unexpectedly fired mr. altman, saying he could no longer be trusted with the company’s mission to build a.i. for the good of humanity. mr. altman was reinstated after five days of negotiations with the board, and soon cemented his control over the company, reclaiming a seat on the board. late last month, openai announced that it had started working on a new artificial intelligence model that would succeed the gpt 4 technology that drives chatgpt. the company said that it expected the new model to bring “the next level of capabilities” as it strove to build a.g.i. the company also said it was creating a new safety and security committee to explore how it should handle the risks posed by the new model and future technologies. cade metz writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology. more about cade metz

musk says ai company now just a closed source de facto subsidiary of microsoft author of the article: you can save this article by registering for free here. or sign in if you have an account. elon musk sued openai and chief executive sam altman, alleging they have breached the artificial intelligence startup’s founding agreement by putting profit ahead of benefiting humanity. the 52 year old billionaire, who was a co founder of openai but no longer owns a stake, said in a suit filed late thursday in san francisco that the company’s close relationship with microsoft corp. has undermined its original mission of creating open source technology that wouldn’t be subject to corporate priorities. create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. musk, who is also ceo of tesla inc., has been among the most outspoken about the dangers of ai and artificial general intelligence. the release of openai’s chatgpt more than a year ago popularized advances in ai technology and raised concerns about the risks surrounding the race to develop agi, where computers are as smart as an average human. “to this day, openai inc.’s website continues to profess that its charter is to ensure that agi ‘benefits all of humanity,’” the lawsuit said. “in reality, however, openai inc. has been transformed into a closed source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: microsoft.” spokespeople for openai and musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment. musk, the world’s richest person, helped establish openai in 2015 but stepped away from the company some two years later over philosophical differences about how to profit from the technology. in addition to leading tesla, he owns the social network x and is raising money for an ai venture he founded called xai that features its own chatgpt type chatbot, grok. breaking business news, incisive views, must reads and market signals. weekdays by 9 a.m. by signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from postmedia network inc. a welcome email is on its way. if you don't see it, please check your junk folder. the next issue of posthaste will soon be in your inbox. we encountered an issue signing you up. please try again in the filing, musk took aim at the restructuring of openai’s leadership last year, a tumultuous period during which altman was ousted as ceo and then quickly reinstated with support from microsoft. musk argued in the suit that altman, openai president greg brockman and microsoft worked together to oust the majority of the startup’s board, who had been responsible for enforcing its original mission of developing technology for the benefit of humanity. since introducing chatgpt and gpt 4, the large language model that powers the chatbot, openai has set off a wave of ai adoption in enterprises around the world. microsoft has been one of the most aggressive in incorporating the technology into its wide array of cloud and enterprise services. “altman hand picked a new board that lacks similar technical expertise or any substantial background in ai governance, which the previous board had by design,” the lawsuit said. “the new board consisted of members with more experience in profit centric enterprises or politics than in ai ethics and governance. they were also reportedly ‘big fans of altman.’” the case marks an escalation in the one of the highest profile clashes in the emerging field of ai, pitting two of its most prominent players against each other. the lawsuit will have implications not just for openai, which is seeking to raise funds at a valuation of $100 billion or more, but also for microsoft. the seattle based firm’s shares have soared 68 per cent in the last year, making it the most valuable company in the world, as it seeks to become a leader in ai adoption. “with this restructuring, openai inc. abandoned its non profit mission of developing agi for the benefit of humanity broadly, thereby keeping it out of the hands of a large for profit corporation in which vast power would be unduly concentrated,” the lawsuit said. with assistance from agatha cantrill. bloomberg.com postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion. please keep comments relevant and respectful. comments may take up to an hour to appear on the site. you will receive an email if there is a reply to your comment, an update to a thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. visit our community guidelines for more information. 365 bloor street east, toronto, ontario, m4w 3l4 © 2025 financial post, a division of postmedia network inc. all rights reserved. unauthorized distribution, transmission or republication strictly prohibited. this website uses cookies to personalize your content (including ads), and allows us to analyze our traffic. read more about cookies here. by continuing to use our site, you agree to our terms of use 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elon musk supported making openai a for profit company, the chatgpt maker said, attacking a lawsuit from the wealthy investor who has accused the artificial intelligence business of betraying its founding goal to benefit humanity as it pursued profits instead. in its first response since the tesla ceo sued last week, openai vowed to get the claim thrown out and released emails from musk, escalating the feud between the san francisco based company and the billionaire that bankrolled its creation years ago. “the mission of openai is to ensure agi benefits all of humanity, which means both building safe and beneficial agi and helping create broadly distributed benefits,” openai said in a blog post late tuesday from five company executives and computer scientists, including ceo sam altman. “we intend to move to dismiss all of elon’s claims.” agi refers to artificial general intelligence, which are general purpose ai systems that can perform just as well as   or even better than   humans in a wide variety of tasks. musk’s lawsuit said that when he funded openai as it was launching, he secured an agreement that the research lab would remain a nonprofit developing technology for the public’s benefit. his lawsuit claims breach of contract and seeks an injunction preventing anyone   including microsoft, which has invested billions in openai   from benefiting financially from its technology. openai said both the startup and musk recognized the need for the company to become a for profit entity to gain enough resources to compete with companies like google, posting screenshots of emails between the tesla ceo and openai leaders in which they discuss the possibility but can’t agree on terms. “this needs billions per year immediately or forget it,” musk said in an email about the level of funding openai would need. musk on wednesday posted a laughing emoji in response to an x user who said openai should be renamed openemail. “change your name,” musk also replied on the social media platform he owns that is formerly known as twitter. musk was an early investor in openai when it was founded in 2015 and co chaired its board alongside altman. he said in his lawsuit that he invested “tens of millions” of dollars in openai. however, the company said that while musk invested less than $45 million, it has raised more than $90 million from other donors. openai said that by 2017, the company leaders started to realize that building artificial general intelligence would take vast amounts of computing power. “we all understood we were going to need a lot more capital to succeed at our mission   billions of dollars per year, which was far more than any of us, especially elon, thought we’d be able to raise as the non profit,” it said. in discussions, openai says musk demanded to be ceo and majority shareholder and have control of the board but openai executives didn’t think any single person should have “absolute control.” musk then suggested openai could be merged with tesla so that the electric car maker could act as a “cash cow” to compete with google’s well funded ai efforts. it didn’t happen, and musk instead left to build his own artificial general intelligence startup, while remaining supportive of openai’s plans to raise billions of dollars, the company said. openai also pushed back against musk’s argument that it broke its promise to keep its code open to the public instead of walling it off for private gains. it posted an email from chief scientist ilya sutskever saying that open sourcing everything lets “someone unscrupulous” build “unsafe ai” and that “it’s totally ok to not share the science.” musk replied: “yup.” sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more english language news coverage from el país usa edition ¿quieres añadir otro usuario a tu suscripción? si continúas leyendo en este dispositivo, no se podrá leer en el otro. ¿por qué estás viendo esto? si quieres compartir tu cuenta, cambia tu suscripción a la modalidad premium, así podrás añadir otro usuario. cada uno accederá con su propia cuenta de email, lo que os permitirá personalizar vuestra experiencia en el país. ¿tienes una suscripción de empresa? accede aquí para contratar más cuentas. en el caso de no saber quién está usando tu cuenta, te recomendamos cambiar tu contraseña aquí. si decides continuar compartiendo tu cuenta, este mensaje se mostrará en tu dispositivo y en el de la otra persona que está usando tu cuenta de forma indefinida, afectando a tu experiencia de lectura. puedes consultar aquí los términos y condiciones de la suscripción digital. suscríbete y lee sin límites

lawsuit says chief executive sam altman’s deal with microsoft has broken organisation’s mission elon musk has filed a lawsuit accusing openai and its chief executive, sam altman, of betraying its foundational mission by putting the pursuit of profit ahead of the benefit of humanity. the world’s richest man, a founding board member of the artificial intelligence company behind chatgpt, claimed altman had “set aflame” openai’s founding agreement by signing an investment deal with microsoft. the lawsuit, filed in san francisco on thursday, claims openai is now developing artificial general intelligence (agi)   a theoretical form of ai that can perform a range of tasks at or above a human level of intelligence   for profit rather than for the benefit of humankind. “openai inc has been transformed into a closed source, de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: microsoft. under its new board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an agi to maximise profits for microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity,” the lawsuit alleges. the suit opens with musk’s often stated warning that agi poses “a grave threat to humanity”. “where some like mr musk see an existential threat in agi, others see agi as a source of profit and power,” said the lawsuit, adding that in the hands of for profit companies such as google, agi poses a “particularly acute and noxious danger to humanity”. musk and other tech experts are concerned that an agi could evade human control and take actions that endanger the planet. the suit claims altman purported to share musk’s concerns over agi and in 2015 proposed forming a non profit ai lab that would be “the opposite of google”, now known as openai. together with greg brockman, openai’s president, who is also being sued by musk, the three men agreed to create a lab whose principles would be enshrined in a founding agreement. the lab would be “for the benefit of humanity”, would be a not for profit company and would be open source, the term for making the technology freely available. the lawsuit claims that musk, who stepped away from openai in 2018, was a “moving force” behind the creation of openai and supplied a majority of its funding in its early years. microsoft is now the biggest investor in openai’s profit making arm, which altman runs, after a deal struck in 2020. the lawsuit claims that openai, altman and brockman “set the founding agreement aflame” in 2023 after releasing gpt 4, the powerful model that underpins openai’s chatgpt chatbot. gpt 4’s design was kept secret and such behaviour showed a radical departure from openai’s original mission, the lawsuit said. “this secrecy is primarily driven by commercial considerations, not safety,” says the lawsuit, which is claiming breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty and unfair business practices. it added that gpt 4 was an agi technology effectively owned by microsoft, an arrangement that is allegedly outside the scope of the company’s licensing agreement with openai. the lawsuit also claims openai is developing a model know as q* [q star] that has an even stronger claim to be agi. the lawsuit goes on to claim that the tumultuous period of events in november 2023, when altman was sacked as openai’s ceo and then reinstated, showed microsoft had “significant leverage” over the company. the new board introduced after altman’s reinstatement does not have the expertise to ascertain whether the company has achieved agi and thus whether it has produced a product outside the scope of microsoft’s licence, the lawsuit adds. sign up to business today get set for the working day   we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion “this case is filed to compel openai to adhere to the founding agreement and return to its mission to develop agi for the benefit of humanity, not to personally benefit the individual defendants and the largest technology company in the world,” the lawsuit claims. openai’s deal with microsoft is being scrutinised by competition authorities in the us, the eu and the uk. brian quinn, a professor at boston college law school in the us, said there were multiple issues with the lawsuit. he said musk did not have the standing to sue for breach of the openai board’s certificate of incorporation because he was not a board member. the suit addresses this by claiming that a 2015 email between musk and altman setting out the founding agreement, together with the certificate, constitutes a contract. quinn said this fell “far short” of being a viable legal argument. a demand for return of money that musk invested in openai was also likely to fail because the suit claimed openai veered from its mission in 2023   long after musk stopped supporting the non profit. “it’s hard to see that he has any standing to attempt to enforce his ‘founding agreement’ or the certificate,” said quinn. openai, microsoft and google have been approached for comment.

oakland, calif. (ap)   elon musk's lawyers faced off with openai in court tuesday as a federal judge weighed the billionaire's request for a court order that would block the chatgpt maker from converting itself to a for profit company. u.s. district judge yvonne gonzalez rogers said it was a “stretch” for musk to claim he will be irreparably harmed if she doesn't intervene to stop openai from moving forward with its transition from a nonprofit research laboratory to a for profit corporation. but the judge also raised concerns about openai and its relationship with business partner microsoft and said she wouldn't stop the case from moving to trial as soon as next year so a jury can decide. “it is plausible that what mr. musk is saying is true. we’ll find out. he’ll sit on the stand,” she said. musk, an early openai investor and board member, sued the artificial intelligence company last year, first in a california state court and later in federal court, alleging it had betrayed its founding aims as a nonprofit research lab benefiting the public good. musk had invested about $45 million in the startup from its founding until 2018, his lawyer said tuesday. musk escalated the legal dispute late last year, adding new claims and defendants and asking for a court order that would stop openai’s plans to convert itself into a for profit business more fully. musk also added his own ai company, xai, as a plaintiff. also targeted by musk's lawsuit is openai's close business partner microsoft and tech entrepreneur reid hoffman, a former openai board member who also sits on microsoft's board. gonzalez rogers said she has a high bar for approving the kind of preliminary injunction that musk wants but hasn't yet ruled on the request. she did say she had “significant concerns” with two people connected to microsoft on openai's board   hoffman and longtime microsoft executive deanna templeton, who was a “non voting observer.” “so you want me to believe that she was sitting there listening to all the discussions and not telling anybody? what would the point be for her to sit there and listen to everybody, if not to communicate what she was listening? there would be no point for her to be there, which is why she actually should not be there,” she said. hoffman, a co founder of linkedin, has been on microsoft’s board since shortly after the tech giant bought the job networking site. he stepped down from openai's board in 2023 to avoid conflicts with his ai startup, inflection. templeton, who musk also named as a defendant, was added as a non voting member of openai’s board in the aftermath of altman’s ouster after microsoft ceo satya nadella sought more stability on the board. but months later, she was dropped from the openai board as u.s. antitrust enforcers were expressing concerns about such arrangements on corporate boards. the judge has handled a number of tech industry cases including apple's fight with epic games, though she said tuesday that musk's case is “nothing like” that one. that case was also the last time she granted a preliminary injunction, in 2020, eight months before the case went to trial. then president barack obama appointed gonzalez rogers to the federal bench in 2011. tuesday's hearing was originally set for january but was postponed after musk's attorney marc toberoff said his house was destroyed in the pacific palisades wildfire. musk, who did not attend the hearing, has alleged in the lawsuit that the companies are violating the terms of his foundational contributions to the charity. judge gonzalez rogers called it a “stretch” to claim “irreparable harm” to musk, and called the case “billionaires vs. billionaires.” she questioned why musk invested tens of millions in openai without a written contract. toberoff said it was because the relationship between altman and musk at the time was “built on trust” and the two were very close. “that is just a lot of money” to invest “on a handshake,” the judge said. openai has said musk’s requested court order would “debilitate openai’s business” and mission to the advantage of musk and his own ai company and is based on “far fetched” legal claims. at the heart of the dispute is a 2017 internal power struggle at the fledgling startup that led to altman becoming openai’s ceo. emails disclosed by openai show musk had also sought to be ceo and grew frustrated after two other openai co founders said he would hold too much power as a major shareholder and chief executive if the startup succeeded in its goal to achieve better than human ai known as artificial general intelligence, or agi. musk has long voiced concerns about how advanced forms of ai could threaten humanity. altman eventually succeeded in becoming ceo and has remained so except for a period in 2023 when he was fired and then reinstated days later after the board that ousted him was replaced. openai has sought to demonstrate musk’s early support for the idea of making openai a for profit business so it could raise money for the hardware and computer power that ai needs. musk is not the only one challenging openai's for profit transition. facebook and instagram parent meta platforms has asked california's attorney general to block it, and the office of delaware's attorney general has said it is reviewing the conversion. it was not clear tuesday when the case might go to trial. musk's lawyers initially said they would be ready by june after some back and forth with the two sides the judge indicated it probably won't be until june 2026 at the earliest, but likely early 2027.         o'brien reported from providence, rhode island.         the associated press and openai have a licensing and technology agreement that allows openai access to part of ap’s text archives. sign in to access your portfolio

artificial intelligence supported by once united over the future of artificial intelligence, they have become increasingly estranged over the years. by yiwen lu and tripp mickle reporting from san francisco a decade ago, elon musk and sam altman bonded over a shared concern about the dangers of artificial intelligence. that led them in 2015 to create openai, a nonprofit a.i. lab that had the aim of benefiting humanity. in 2018, mr. musk departed openai after a power struggle with mr. altman. mr. musk later expressed dismay that the lab had turned into a for profit company. over the years, the two men have increasingly made barbed comments about each other, including when mr. altman was briefly ousted from openai in november before being reinstated. on thursday, mr. musk sued mr. altman and openai, accusing them of breaching the founding contract between mr. musk and mr. altman by putting profits and commercial interests ahead of the public good in developing a.i. here’s what mr. musk and mr. altman have said about each other over the years, and what they have jointly said. post on x, in november: “what matters is having directors who deeply understand ai and will stand up to sam. human civilization is at stake here.” at the new york times’s dealbook summit, in november: “i have mixed feelings about sam. the ring of power can corrupt, and he has the ring of power. so i don’t know.” “i’m quite concerned that there’s some dangerous element of a.i. that they’ve created." in this week’s lawsuit: “mr. altman caused openai to radically depart from its original mission and historical practice of making its technology and knowledge available to the public.”

openai   in its first public comments since elon musk claimed in a lawsuit the artificial intelligence behemoth puts “profit over humanity”   claimed the tech tycoon tried to gain “full control” of the company six years ago by merging it with tesla. the chatgpt maker included the allegation in a tuesday evening blog post, saying “we intend to move to dismiss all of elon’s claims,” which include that sam altman has led the firm to “radically depart from its original mission” by prioritizing profit over humanity. “as we discussed a for profit structure in order to further the mission, elon wanted us to merge with tesla or he wanted full control,” openai’s founding team and executives   including sam altman, greg brockman, ilya sutskever, john schulman, wojciech zaremba   penned in the post. in early february 2018, the same month musk left openai   reportedly over disagreements with the deal altman struck with microsoft, marking a transition away from the company’s purely nonprofit roots   he “forwarded us an email suggesting that openai should ‘attach to tesla as its cash cow,’ commenting that it was ‘exactly right,'” per openai’s blog post. “tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to google,” musk reportedly added in the note. the openai band went on to expose musk’s vow to make a $1 billion funding commitment to the company   the most valuable ai startup that’s reportedly worth $80 billion in the wake of a recent secondary stock sale. however, “in total, the non profit has raised less than $45m from elon and more than $90m from other donors,” openai said amid its escalating feud with musk, who noted in his complaint filed on feb. 29 in california’s superior court that openai’s certificate of incorporation states that its work isn’t “organized for the private gain of any person.” “when he left in late february 2018, he told our team he was supportive of us finding our own path to raising billions of dollars,” openai claimed. although openai is still governed by a nonprofit, it has bolstered its for profit arm in recent years with the help of prominent investors like microsoft, which has committed $13 billion to the company as part of a “multi year agreement.” as part of the deal, microsoft received a 49% stake in the earnings of openai’s for profit arm. other major shareholders of openai’s profitable business include linkedin founder reid hoffman and billionaire venture capitalist vinod khosla of khosla ventures. musk said in the court documents that he filed the case “to compel openai to adhere to the founding agreement and return to its mission to develop agi [artificial general intelligence] for the benefit of humanity, not to personally benefit the individual defendants and the largest technology company in the world.” the court filing   which asks for a jury trial and a court order requiring openai to continue to follow its alleged vow to benefit the public rather than microsoft   also claims that the ai giant now seeks “to maximize profits for microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity.” openai denied the allegations in its blog post, where it said “the mission of openai is to ensure agi [artificial general intelligence] benefits all of humanity, which means both building safe and beneficial agi and helping create broadly distributed benefits.” most recently, openai added a new software to its high tech portfolio called sora, which can produce a one minute video in response to a few simple text queries. the technology is currently available to select creators and security experts who will “red team” the product for security issues   a process where a group pretends to be an enemy and attempts a physical or digital intrusion against an organization. it wasn’t immediately clear when sora will become available to the general public, or if it will be free for users upon its release.

openai is an american artificial intelligence (ai) research organization founded in december 2015 and headquartered in san francisco, california. its stated mission is to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (agi), which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work".[5] as a leading organization in the ongoing ai boom,[6] openai is known for the gpt family of large language models, the dall e series of text to image models, and a text to video model named sora.[7][8] its release of chatgpt in november 2022 has been credited with catalyzing widespread interest in generative ai. the organization consists of the non profit openai, inc.,[9] registered in delaware, and its for profit subsidiary introduced in 2019, openai global, llc.[10] microsoft owns roughly 49% of openai's equity, having invested us$13 billion.[11] it also provides computing resources to openai through its cloud platform, microsoft azure.[12] in 2023 and 2024, openai faced multiple lawsuits for alleged copyright infringement against authors and media companies whose work was used to train some of openai's products. in november 2023, openai's board removed sam altman as ceo, citing a lack of confidence in him, but reinstated him five days later following a reconstruction of the board. throughout 2024, roughly half of then employed ai safety researchers left openai, citing the company's prominent role in an industry wide problem.[13][14] in december 2015, openai was founded by sam altman, elon musk, ilya sutskever, greg brockman, trevor blackwell, vicki cheung, andrej karpathy, durk kingma, john schulman, pamela vagata, and wojciech zaremba, with sam altman and elon musk as the co chairs. a total of $1 billion in capital was pledged by sam altman, greg brockman, elon musk, reid hoffman, jessica livingston, peter thiel, amazon web services (aws), infosys, and yc research.[15][16] the actual collected total amount of contributions was only $130 million until 2019.[10] according to an investigation led by techcrunch, musk was its largest donor while yc research did not contribute anything at all.[17] the organization stated it would "freely collaborate" with other institutions and researchers by making its patents and research open to the public.[18][19] openai was initially run from brockman's living room.[20] it was later headquartered at the pioneer building in the mission district, san francisco.[21][22] according to wired, brockman met with yoshua bengio, one of the "founding fathers" of deep learning, and drew up a list of the "best researchers in the field".[23] brockman was able to hire nine of them as the first employees in december 2015.[23] in 2016, openai paid corporate level (rather than nonprofit level) salaries, but did not pay ai researchers salaries comparable to those of facebook or google.[23] microsoft's peter lee stated that the cost of a top ai researcher exceeds the cost of a top nfl quarterback prospect.[23] openai's potential and mission drew these researchers to the firm; a google employee said he was willing to leave google for openai "partly because of the very strong group of people and, to a very large extent, because of its mission."[23] brockman stated that "the best thing that i could imagine doing was moving humanity closer to building real ai in a safe way."[23] openai co founder wojciech zaremba stated that he turned down "borderline crazy" offers of two to three times his market value to join openai instead.[23] in april 2016, openai released a public beta of "openai gym", its platform for reinforcement learning research.[24] nvidia gifted its first dgx 1 supercomputer to openai in august 2016 to help it train larger and more complex ai models with the capability of reducing processing time from six days to two hours.[25][26] in december 2016, openai released "universe", a software platform for measuring and training an ai's general intelligence across the world's supply of games, websites, and other applications.[27][28][29][30] in 2017, openai spent $7.9 million, or a quarter of its functional expenses, on cloud computing alone.[31] in comparison, deepmind's total expenses in 2017 were $442 million. in the summer of 2018, simply training openai's dota 2 bots required renting 128,000 cpus and 256 gpus from google for multiple weeks. in 2018, musk resigned from his board of directors seat, citing "a potential future conflict [of interest]" with his role as ceo of tesla due to tesla's ai development for self driving cars.[32] sam altman claims that musk believed that openai had fallen behind other players like google and musk proposed instead to take over openai himself, which the board rejected. musk subsequently left openai. in february 2019, gpt 2 was announced, which gained attention for its ability to generate human like text.[33] in 2019, openai transitioned from non profit to "capped" for profit, with the profit being capped at 100 times any investment.[34] according to openai, the capped profit model allows openai global, llc to legally attract investment from venture funds and, in addition, to grant employees stakes in the company.[35] many top researchers work for google brain, deepmind, or facebook, which offer stock options that a nonprofit would be unable to.[36] before the transition, public disclosure of the compensation of top employees at openai was legally required.[37] the company then distributed equity to its employees and partnered with microsoft,[38] announcing an investment package of $1 billion into the company. since then, openai systems have run on an azure based supercomputing platform from microsoft.[39][40][41] openai global, llc then announced its intention to commercially license its technologies.[42] it planned to spend the $1 billion "within five years, and possibly much faster".[43] altman has stated that even a billion dollars may turn out to be insufficient, and that the lab may ultimately need "more capital than any non profit has ever raised" to achieve artificial general intelligence.[44] the transition from a nonprofit to a capped profit company was viewed with skepticism by oren etzioni of the nonprofit allen institute for ai, who agreed that wooing top researchers to a nonprofit is difficult, but stated "i disagree with the notion that a nonprofit can't compete" and pointed to successful low budget projects by openai and others. "if bigger and better funded was always better, then ibm would still be number one." the nonprofit, openai, inc., is the sole controlling shareholder of openai global, llc, which, despite being a for profit company, retains a formal fiduciary responsibility to openai, inc.'s nonprofit charter. a majority of openai, inc.'s board is barred from having financial stakes in openai global, llc.[35] in addition, minority members with a stake in openai global, llc are barred from certain votes due to conflict of interest.[36] some researchers have argued that openai global, llc's switch to for profit status is inconsistent with openai's claims to be "democratizing" ai.[45] in 2020, openai announced gpt 3, a language model trained on large internet datasets. gpt 3 is aimed at natural language answering questions, but it can also translate between languages and coherently generate improvised text. it also announced that an associated api, named simply "the api", would form the heart of its first commercial product.[46] eleven employees left openai, mostly between december 2020 and january 2021, in order to establish anthropic.[47] in 2021, openai introduced dall e, a specialized deep learning model adept at generating complex digital images from textual descriptions, utilizing a variant of the gpt 3 architecture.[48] in december 2022, openai received widespread media coverage after launching a free preview of chatgpt, its new ai chatbot based on gpt 3.5. according to openai, the preview received over a million signups within the first five days.[50] according to anonymous sources cited by reuters in december 2022, openai global, llc was projecting $200 million of revenue in 2023 and $1 billion in revenue in 2024.[51] in january 2023, openai global, llc was in talks for funding that would value the company at $29 billion, double its 2021 value.[52] on january 23, 2023, microsoft announced a new us$10 billion investment in openai global, llc over multiple years, partially needed to use microsoft's cloud computing service azure.[53][54] rumors of this deal suggested that microsoft may receive 75% of openai's profits until it secures its investment return and a 49% stake in the company.[55] the investment is believed to be a part of microsoft's efforts to integrate openai's chatgpt into the bing search engine. google announced a similar ai application (bard), after chatgpt was launched, fearing that chatgpt could threaten google's place as a go to source for information.[56][57] on february 7, 2023, microsoft announced that it was building ai technology based on the same foundation as chatgpt into microsoft bing, edge, microsoft 365 and other products.[58] on march 3, 2023, reid hoffman resigned from his board seat, citing a desire to avoid conflicts of interest with his investments in ai companies via greylock partners, and his co founding of the ai startup inflection ai. hoffman remained on the board of microsoft, a major investor in openai.[59] on march 14, 2023, openai released gpt 4, both as an api (with a waitlist) and as a feature of chatgpt plus.[60] on may 22, 2023, sam altman, greg brockman and ilya sutskever posted recommendations for the governance of superintelligence.[61] they consider that superintelligence could happen within the next 10 years, allowing a "dramatically more prosperous future" and that "given the possibility of existential risk, we can't just be reactive". they propose creating an international watchdog organization similar to iaea to oversee ai systems above a certain capability threshold, suggesting that relatively weak ai systems on the other side should not be overly regulated. they also call for more technical safety research for superintelligences, and ask for more coordination, for example through governments launching a joint project which "many current efforts become part of".[61][62] in july 2023, openai launched the superalignment project, aiming to find within 4 years how to align future superintelligences by automating alignment research using ai.[63] in august 2023, it was announced that openai had acquired the new york based start up global illumination, a company that deploys ai to develop digital infrastructure and creative tools.[64] on september 21, 2023, microsoft had begun rebranding all variants of its copilot to microsoft copilot, including the former bing chat and the microsoft 365 copilot.[65] this strategy was followed in december 2023 by adding the ms copilot to many installations of windows 11 and windows 10 as well as a standalone microsoft copilot app released for android[66] and one released for ios thereafter.[67] in october 2023, sam altman and peng xiao, ceo of the emirati ai firm g42, announced open ai would let g42 deploy open ai technology.[68] in january 2024, openai announced a partnership with arizona state university that would give it complete access to chatgpt enterprise. it is openai's first partnership with an educational institution.[72] in february, the u.s. securities and exchange commission was reportedly investigating openai over whether company communications made by altman were used to mislead investors; and an investigation of altman's statements, opened by the southern new york u.s. attorney's office was ongoing.[73][74] on february 15, 2024, openai announced a text to video model named sora, which it plans to release to the public at an unspecified date.[75] it is available for red teams for managing critical harms and risks.[76] on february 29, 2024, openai and ceo sam altman were sued by elon musk, who accused them of prioritizing profits over public good, contrary to openai's original mission[10] of developing ai for humanity's benefit.[77] the lawsuit cited openai's policy shift after partnering with microsoft, questioning its open source commitment and stirring the ai ethics vs. profit debate.[78] openai stated that "elon understood the mission did not imply open sourcing agi."[79] it denied being a de facto microsoft subsidiary.[80] on march 11, in a court filing, openai said it was "doing just fine without elon musk" after he left in 2018. they responded to musk's lawsuit, calling his claims "incoherent", "frivolous", "extraordinary" and "a fiction".[81] in june musk unexpectedly withdrew the lawsuit,[82] but in august reopened it against altman and others, alleging altman claimed openai was going to be founded as a non profit.[83][84] on may 15, 2024, ilya sutskever resigned and was replaced with jakub pachocki [pl] to be the chief scientist.[85] jan leike, the other co leader of the superalignment team, announced his departure, citing an erosion of safety and trust in openai's leadership.[86] the departures, along with researchers leaving, led openai to absorb the team's work into other research areas, and shut down the superalignment group.[87] according to sources interviewed by fortune, openai's promise of allocating 20% of its computing capabilities to the superalignment project had not been fulfilled.[88] on may 19, 2024, reddit and openai announced a partnership to integrate reddit's content into openai products, including chatgpt. this allows openai to access reddit's data api, providing real time, structured content to enhance ai tools and user engagement with reddit communities. reddit plans to develop new ai powered features for users and moderators using openai's platform. the partnership aligns with reddit's commitment to privacy, adhering to its public content policy and existing data api terms, which restrict commercial use without approval. openai will serve as a reddit advertising partner.[89] on may 22, 2024, openai entered into an agreement with news corp to integrate news content from the wall street journal, new york post, the times, and the sunday times into its ai platform. meanwhile, other publications like the new york times chose to sue openai and microsoft for copyright infringement over use of their content to train ai models.[90] on may 29, 2024, axios reported that openai had signed deals with vox media and the atlantic to share content to enhance the accuracy of ai models like chatgpt by incorporating reliable news sources, addressing concerns about ai misinformation.[91] concerns were expressed by journalists and unions. the vox union stated, "as both journalists and workers, we have serious concerns about this partnership, which we believe could adversely impact members of our union, not to mention the well documented ethical and environmental concerns surrounding the use of generative ai."[92] a group of nine current and former openai employees has accused the company of prioritizing profits over safety, using restrictive agreements to silence concerns, and moving too quickly with inadequate risk management. they call for greater transparency, whistleblower protections, and legislative regulation of ai development.[93] on june 10, 2024, it was announced that openai had partnered with apple inc. to bring chatgpt features to apple intelligence and iphone.[94] on june 13, 2024, openai announced that paul nakasone, the former head of the nsa was joining its board. nakasone also joined the security subcommittee.[95] on june 24, 2024, openai acquired multi, a startup running a collaboration platform based on zoom.[96] in july 2024, reuters reported that openai is working on a project to enhance ai reasoning capabilities, and to enable ai to plan ahead, navigate the internet autonomously, and conduct "deep research".[97][98] the project was released on september 12 and named o1.[99] on august 5, techcrunch reported that openai's cofounder john schulman had left to join rival startup anthropic. schulman cited a desire to focus more on ai alignment research. openai's president and co founder, greg brockman, took extended leave till november.[100] in september 2024, openai's global affairs chief, anna makanju, expressed support for the uk's approach to ai regulation during her testimony to a house of lords committee, stating the company favors "smart regulation" and sees the uk's ai white paper as a positive step towards responsible ai development.[101] chief technology officer (cto) mira murati announced her departure from the company to "create the time and space to do my own exploration".[102] it had been reported murati was among those who expressed concerns to the board about altman.[103] in october 2024, openai raised $6.6 billion from investors, potentially valuing the company at $157 billion. the funding attracted returning venture capital firms like thrive capital and khosla ventures, along with major backer microsoft and new investors nvidia and softbank.[104][105] openai's cfo, sarah friar, informed employees that a tender offer for share buybacks would follow the funding, although specifics were yet to be determined. thrive capital invested around $1.2 billion, with the option for an additional $1 billion if revenue goals were met. apple, despite initial interest, did not participate in this funding round.[106] also in october 2024, the intercept revealed that openai's tools were considered "essential" for africom's mission and included in an "exception to fair opportunity" contractual agreement between the department of defense and microsoft.[107] in november 2024, openai acquired the long standing domain chat.com and redirected it to chatgpt's main site.[108][109] moreover, greg brockman rejoined openai after a three month leave from his role as president. an openai spokesperson confirmed his return, highlighting that brockman would collaborate with altman on tackling key technical challenges. his return followed a wave of high profile departures, including mira murati and ilya sutskever, who had since launched their own ai ventures.[110] in december 2024, openai launched several significant features as part of its "12 days of openai" event, which started on december 5. it announced sora, a text to video model intended to create realistic videos from text prompts, and available to chatgpt plus and pro users.[111][112] additionally, openai launched the o1 model, which is designed to be capable of advanced reasoning through its chain of thought processing, enabling it to engage in explicit reasoning before generating responses.[113][114] this model is intended to tackle complex tasks with improved accuracy and transparency. another major release was chatgpt pro, a subscription service priced at $200 per month that provides users with unlimited access to the o1 model and enhanced voice features.[115] openai shared preliminary benchmark results for the upcoming o3 model.[116] the event also saw the expansion of the canvas feature, allowing all users to utilize side by side digital editing capabilities. on january 21, 2025, it was announced that openai, oracle, softbank and mgx would launch the stargate project, a joint venture to build an ai infrastructure system in conjunction with the us government. the project takes its name from openai's existing "stargate" supercomputer project and is estimated to cost $500 billion. the project will be funded over the next four years.[117] on january 24, openai made operator, an ai agent and web automation tool for accessing websites to execute goals defined by users, available to pro users in the u.s.a. only.[118][119] on february 2, openai made deep research agent, that achieved an accuracy of 26.6 percent on humanity's last exam (hle) benchmark, available to $200 monthly fee paying users with up to 100 queries per month, while more “limited access” was promised for plus, team and later enterprise users.[120] in february 2025, openai underwent a rebranding with a new typeface, word mark, symbol and palette.[121] sources:[10][128] some scientists, such as stephen hawking and stuart russell, have articulated concerns that if advanced ai gains the ability to redesign itself at an ever increasing rate, an unstoppable "intelligence explosion" could lead to human extinction. co founder musk characterizes ai as humanity's "biggest existential threat".[130] musk and altman have stated they are partly motivated by concerns about ai safety and the existential risk from artificial general intelligence.[131][132] openai states that "it's hard to fathom how much human level ai could benefit society," and that it is equally difficult to comprehend "how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly".[19] research on safety cannot safely be postponed: "because of ai's surprising history, it's hard to predict when human level ai might come within reach."[133] openai states that ai "should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible."[19] co chair sam altman expects the decades long project to surpass human intelligence.[134] vishal sikka, former ceo of infosys, stated that an "openness", where the endeavor would "produce results generally in the greater interest of humanity", was a fundamental requirement for his support; and that openai "aligns very nicely with our long held values" and their "endeavor to do purposeful work".[135] cade metz of wired suggested that corporations such as amazon might be motivated by a desire to use open source software and data to level the playing field against corporations such as google and facebook, which own enormous supplies of proprietary data. altman stated that y combinator companies would share their data with openai.[134] in the early years before his 2018 departure, musk posed the question: "what is the best thing we can do to ensure the future is good? we could sit on the sidelines or we can encourage regulatory oversight, or we could participate with the right structure with people who care deeply about developing ai in a way that is safe and is beneficial to humanity." he acknowledged that "there is always some risk that in actually trying to advance (friendly) ai we may create the thing we are concerned about"; but nonetheless, that the best defense was "to empower as many people as possible to have ai. if everyone has ai powers, then there's not any one person or a small set of individuals who can have ai superpower."[122] musk and altman's counterintuitive strategy that of trying to reduce the potential harm of ai by giving everyone access to it is controversial among those concerned with existential risk from ai. philosopher nick bostrom said, "if you have a button that could do bad things to the world, you don't want to give it to everyone."[132] during a 2016 conversation about technological singularity, altman said, "we don't plan to release all of our source code" and mentioned a plan to "allow wide swaths of the world to elect representatives to a new governance board". greg brockman stated, "our goal right now ... is to do the best thing there is to do. it's a little vague."[136] conversely, openai's initial decision to withhold gpt 2 around 2019, due to a wish to "err on the side of caution" in the presence of potential misuse, was criticized by advocates of openness. delip rao, an expert in text generation, stated, "i don't think [openai] spent enough time proving [gpt 2] was actually dangerous." other critics argued that open publication was necessary to replicate the research and to create countermeasures.[137] more recently, in 2022, openai published its approach to the alignment problem, anticipating that aligning agi to human values would likely be harder than aligning current ai systems: "unaligned agi could pose substantial risks to humanity[,] and solving the agi alignment problem could be so difficult that it will require all of humanity to work together". they stated that they intended to explore how to better use human feedback to train ai systems, and how to safely use ai to incrementally automate alignment research.[138] in 2024, following the temporary removal of sam altman and his return, many employees gradually left openai, including most of the original leadership team and a significant number of ai safety researchers.[139][140] openai also planned a restructuring to operate as a for profit company. this restructuring could grant altman a stake in the company.[141] at its beginning, openai's research included many projects focused on reinforcement learning (rl).[142] openai has been viewed as an important competitor to deepmind.[143] announced in 2016, gym is an open source python library designed to facilitate the development of reinforcement learning algorithms. it aimed to standardize how environments are defined in ai research, making published research more easily reproducible[24][144] while providing users with a simple interface for interacting with these environments. in 2022, new developments of gym have been moved to the library gymnasium.[145][146] released in 2018, gym retro is a platform for reinforcement learning (rl) research on video games[147] using rl algorithms and study generalization. prior rl research focused mainly on optimizing agents to solve single tasks. gym retro gives the ability to generalize between games with similar concepts but different appearances. released in 2017, robosumo is a virtual world where humanoid metalearning robot agents initially lack knowledge of how to even walk, but are given the goals of learning to move and to push the opposing agent out of the ring.[148] through this adversarial learning process, the agents learn how to adapt to changing conditions. when an agent is then removed from this virtual environment and placed in a new virtual environment with high winds, the agent braces to remain upright, suggesting it had learned how to balance in a generalized way.[148][149] openai's igor mordatch argued that competition between agents could create an intelligence "arms race" that could increase an agent's ability to function even outside the context of the competition.[148] openai five is a team of five openai curated bots used in the competitive five on five video game dota 2, that learn to play against human players at a high skill level entirely through trial and error algorithms. before becoming a team of five, the first public demonstration occurred at the international 2017, the annual premiere championship tournament for the game, where dendi, a professional ukrainian player, lost against a bot in a live one on one matchup.[150][151] after the match, cto greg brockman explained that the bot had learned by playing against itself for two weeks of real time, and that the learning software was a step in the direction of creating software that can handle complex tasks like a surgeon.[152][153] the system uses a form of reinforcement learning, as the bots learn over time by playing against themselves hundreds of times a day for months, and are rewarded for actions such as killing an enemy and taking map objectives.[154][155][156] by june 2018, the ability of the bots expanded to play together as a full team of five, and they were able to defeat teams of amateur and semi professional players.[157][154][158][159] at the international 2018, openai five played in two exhibition matches against professional players, but ended up losing both games.[160][161][162] in april 2019, openai five defeated og, the reigning world champions of the game at the time, 2:0 in a live exhibition match in san francisco.[163][164] the bots' final public appearance came later that month, where they played in 42,729 total games in a four day open online competition, winning 99.4% of those games.[165] openai five's mechanisms in dota 2's bot player shows the challenges of ai systems in multiplayer online battle arena (moba) games and how openai five has demonstrated the use of deep reinforcement learning (drl) agents to achieve superhuman competence in dota 2 matches.[166] developed in 2018, dactyl uses machine learning to train a shadow hand, a human like robot hand, to manipulate physical objects.[167] it learns entirely in simulation using the same rl algorithms and training code as openai five. openai tackled the object orientation problem by using domain randomization, a simulation approach which exposes the learner to a variety of experiences rather than trying to fit to reality. the set up for dactyl, aside from having motion tracking cameras, also has rgb cameras to allow the robot to manipulate an arbitrary object by seeing it. in 2018, openai showed that the system was able to manipulate a cube and an octagonal prism.[168] in 2019, openai demonstrated that dactyl could solve a rubik's cube. the robot was able to solve the puzzle 60% of the time. objects like the rubik's cube introduce complex physics that is harder to model. openai did this by improving the robustness of dactyl to perturbations by using automatic domain randomization (adr), a simulation approach of generating progressively more difficult environments. adr differs from manual domain randomization by not needing a human to specify randomization ranges.[169] in june 2020, openai announced a multi purpose api which it said was "for accessing new ai models developed by openai" to let developers call on it for "any english language ai task".[170][171] the company has popularized generative pretrained transformers (gpt).[172] the original paper on generative pre training of a transformer based language model was written by alec radford and his colleagues, and published in preprint on openai's website on june 11, 2018.[173] it showed how a generative model of language could acquire world knowledge and process long range dependencies by pre training on a diverse corpus with long stretches of contiguous text. generative pre trained transformer 2 ("gpt 2") is an unsupervised transformer language model and the successor to openai's original gpt model ("gpt 1"). gpt 2 was announced in february 2019, with only limited demonstrative versions initially released to the public. the full version of gpt 2 was not immediately released due to concern about potential misuse, including applications for writing fake news.[174] some experts expressed skepticism that gpt 2 posed a significant threat. in response to gpt 2, the allen institute for artificial intelligence responded with a tool to detect "neural fake news".[175] other researchers, such as jeremy howard, warned of "the technology to totally fill twitter, email, and the web up with reasonable sounding, context appropriate prose, which would drown out all other speech and be impossible to filter".[176] in november 2019, openai released the complete version of the gpt 2 language model.[177] several websites host interactive demonstrations of different instances of gpt 2 and other transformer models.[178][179][180] gpt 2's authors argue unsupervised language models to be general purpose learners, illustrated by gpt 2 achieving state of the art accuracy and perplexity on 7 of 8 zero shot tasks (i.e. the model was not further trained on any task specific input output examples). the corpus it was trained on, called webtext, contains slightly 40 gigabytes of text from urls shared in reddit submissions with at least 3 upvotes. it avoids certain issues encoding vocabulary with word tokens by using byte pair encoding. this permits representing any string of characters by encoding both individual characters and multiple character tokens.[181] first described in may 2020, generative pre trained[a] transformer 3 (gpt 3) is an unsupervised transformer language model and the successor to gpt 2.[182][183][184] openai stated that the full version of gpt 3 contained 175 billion parameters,[184] two orders of magnitude larger than the 1.5 billion[185] in the full version of gpt 2 (although gpt 3 models with as few as 125 million parameters were also trained).[186] openai stated that gpt 3 succeeded at certain "meta learning" tasks and could generalize the purpose of a single input output pair. the gpt 3 release paper gave examples of translation and cross linguistic transfer learning between english and romanian, and between english and german.[184] gpt 3 dramatically improved benchmark results over gpt 2. openai cautioned that such scaling up of language models could be approaching or encountering the fundamental capability limitations of predictive language models.[187] pre training gpt 3 required several thousand petaflop/s days[b] of compute, compared to tens of petaflop/s days for the full gpt 2 model.[184] like its predecessor,[174] the gpt 3 trained model was not immediately released to the public for concerns of possible abuse, although openai planned to allow access through a paid cloud api after a two month free private beta that began in june 2020.[170][189] on september 23, 2020, gpt 3 was licensed exclusively to microsoft.[190][191] announced in mid 2021, codex is a descendant of gpt 3 that has additionally been trained on code from 54 million github repositories,[192][193] and is the ai powering the code autocompletion tool github copilot.[193] in august 2021, an api was released in private beta.[194] according to openai, the model can create working code in over a dozen programming languages, most effectively in python.[192] several issues with glitches, design flaws and security vulnerabilities were cited.[195][196] github copilot has been accused of emitting copyrighted code, with no author attribution or license.[197] openai announced that they would discontinue support for codex api on march 23, 2023.[198] on march 14, 2023, openai announced the release of generative pre trained transformer 4 (gpt 4), capable of accepting text or image inputs.[199] they announced that the updated technology passed a simulated law school bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers. (by contrast, gpt 3.5 scored around the bottom 10%.) they said that gpt 4 could also read, analyze or generate up to 25,000 words of text, and write code in all major programming languages.[200] observers reported that the iteration of chatgpt using gpt 4 was an improvement on the previous gpt 3.5 based iteration, with the caveat that gpt 4 retained some of the problems with earlier revisions.[201] gpt 4 is also capable of taking images as input on chatgpt.[202] openai has declined to reveal various technical details and statistics about gpt 4, such as the precise size of the model.[203] on may 13, 2024, openai announced and released gpt 4o, which can process and generate text, images and audio.[204] gpt 4o achieved state of the art results in voice, multilingual, and vision benchmarks, setting new records in audio speech recognition and translation.[205][206] it scored 88.7% on the massive multitask language understanding (mmlu) benchmark compared to 86.5% by gpt 4.[207] on july 18, 2024, openai released gpt 4o mini, a smaller version of gpt 4o replacing gpt 3.5 turbo on the chatgpt interface. its api costs $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens, compared to $5 and $15 respectively for gpt 4o. openai expects it to be particularly useful for enterprises, startups and developers seeking to automate services with ai agents.[208] on september 12, 2024, openai released the o1 preview and o1 mini models, which have been designed to take more time to think about their responses, leading to higher accuracy. these models are particularly effective in science, coding, and reasoning tasks, and were made available to chatgpt plus and team members.[209][210] in december 2024, o1 preview was replaced by o1.[211] on december 20, 2024, openai unveiled o3, the successor of the o1 reasoning model. openai also unveiled o3 mini, a lighter and faster version of openai o3. as of december 21, 2024, this model is not available for public use. according to openai, they are testing o3 and o3 mini.[212][213] until january 10, 2025, safety and security researchers had the opportunity to apply for early access to these models.[214] the model is called o3 rather than o2 to avoid confusion with telecommunications services provider o2.[215] deep research is an agent developed by openai, unveiled on february 2, 2025. it leverages the capabilities of openai's o3 model to perform extensive web browsing, data analysis, and synthesis, delivering comprehensive reports within a timeframe of 5 to 30 minutes.[216] with browsing and python tools enabled, it reached an accuracy of 26.6 percent on hle (humanity's last exam) benchmark.[120] revealed in 2021, clip (contrastive language image pre training) is a model that is trained to analyze the semantic similarity between text and images. it can notably be used for image classification.[217] revealed in 2021, dall e is a transformer model that creates images from textual descriptions.[218] dall e uses a 12 billion parameter version of gpt 3 to interpret natural language inputs (such as "a green leather purse shaped like a pentagon" or "an isometric view of a sad capybara") and generate corresponding images. it can create images of realistic objects ("a stained glass window with an image of a blue strawberry") as well as objects that do not exist in reality ("a cube with the texture of a porcupine"). as of march 2021, no api or code is available. in april 2022, openai announced dall e 2, an updated version of the model with more realistic results.[219] in december 2022, openai published on github software for point e, a new rudimentary system for converting a text description into a 3 dimensional model.[220] in september 2023, openai announced dall e 3, a more powerful model better able to generate images from complex descriptions without manual prompt engineering and render complex details like hands and text.[221] it was released to the public as a chatgpt plus feature in october.[222] sora is a text to video model that can generate videos based on short descriptive prompts[223] as well as extend existing videos forwards or backwards in time.[224] it can generate videos with resolution up to 1920x1080 or 1080x1920. the maximal length of generated videos is unknown. sora's development team named it after the japanese word for "sky", to signify its "limitless creative potential".[223] sora's technology is an adaptation of the technology behind the dall·e 3 text to image model.[225] openai trained the system using publicly available videos as well as copyrighted videos licensed for that purpose, but did not reveal the number or the exact sources of the videos.[223] openai demonstrated some sora created high definition videos to the public on february 15, 2024, stating that it could generate videos up to one minute long. it also shared a technical report highlighting the methods used to train the model, and the model's capabilities.[225] it acknowledged some of its shortcomings, including struggles simulating complex physics.[226] will douglas heaven of the mit technology review called the demonstration videos "impressive", but noted that they must have been cherry picked and might not represent sora's typical output.[225] despite skepticism from some academic leaders following sora's public demo, notable entertainment industry figures have shown significant interest in the technology's potential. in an interview, actor/filmmaker tyler perry expressed his astonishment at the technology's ability to generate realistic video from text descriptions, citing its potential to revolutionize storytelling and content creation. he said that his excitement about sora's possibilities was so strong that he had decided to pause plans for expanding his atlanta based movie studio.[227] released in 2022, whisper is a general purpose speech recognition model.[228] it is trained on a large dataset of diverse audio and is also a multi task model that can perform multilingual speech recognition as well as speech translation and language identification.[229] released in 2019, musenet is a deep neural net trained to predict subsequent musical notes in midi music files. it can generate songs with 10 instruments in 15 styles. according to the verge, a song generated by musenet tends to start reasonably but then fall into chaos the longer it plays.[230][231] in pop culture, initial applications of this tool were used as early as 2020 for the internet psychological thriller ben drowned to create music for the titular character.[232][233] released in 2020, jukebox is an open sourced algorithm to generate music with vocals. after training on 1.2 million samples, the system accepts a genre, artist, and a snippet of lyrics and outputs song samples. openai stated the songs "show local musical coherence [and] follow traditional chord patterns" but acknowledged that the songs lack "familiar larger musical structures such as choruses that repeat" and that "there is a significant gap" between jukebox and human generated music. the verge stated "it's technologically impressive, even if the results sound like mushy versions of songs that might feel familiar", while business insider stated "surprisingly, some of the resulting songs are catchy and sound legitimate".[234][235][236] in 2018, openai launched the debate game, which teaches machines to debate toy problems in front of a human judge. the purpose is to research whether such an approach may assist in auditing ai decisions and in developing explainable ai.[237][238] released in 2020, microscope[239] is a collection of visualizations of every significant layer and neuron of eight neural network models which are often studied in interpretability.[240] microscope was created to analyze the features that form inside these neural networks easily. the models included are alexnet, vgg 19, different versions of inception, and different versions of clip resnet.[241] launched in november 2022, chatgpt is an artificial intelligence tool built on top of gpt 3 that provides a conversational interface that allows users to ask questions in natural language. the system then responds with an answer within seconds. chatgpt reached 1 million users 5 days after its launch.[242][243] as of 2023, chatgpt plus is a gpt 4 backed version of chatgpt[244] available for a us$20 per month subscription fee[245] (the original version is backed by gpt 3.5).[246] openai also makes gpt 4 available to a select group of applicants through their gpt 4 api waitlist;[247] after being accepted, an additional fee of us$0.03 per 1000 tokens in the initial text provided to the model ("prompt"), and us$0.06 per 1000 tokens that the model generates ("completion"), is charged for access to the version of the model with an 8192 token context window; for the 32768 token context window, the prices are doubled.[248] in may 2023, openai launched a user interface for chatgpt for the app store on ios and later in july 2023 for the play store on android.[249] the app supports chat history syncing and voice input (using whisper, openai's speech recognition model).[250][249][251] in september 2023, openai announced that chatgpt "can now see, hear, and speak". chatgpt plus users can upload images, while mobile app users can talk to the chatbot.[252][253] in october 2023, openai's latest image generation model, dall e 3, was integrated into chatgpt plus and chatgpt enterprise. the integration uses chatgpt to write prompts for dall e guided by conversation with users.[254][255] openai's gpt store, initially slated for a 2023 launch, is now deferred to an undisclosed date in early 2024, attributed likely to the leadership changes in november following the initial announcement.[256] concerns about the energy consumption of generative ai, including chatgpt, are rising. in september 2024, microsoft entered a deal with constellation energy to reopen the three mile island nuclear plant to supply power to its ai driven data centers.[257] in december 2024, openai launched a new feature allowing users to call chatgpt for up to 15 minutes per month for free.[258][259] searchgpt, a prototype search engine developed by openai, was unveiled on july 25, 2024, with an initial limited release to 10,000 test users. it combines traditional search engine features with generative ai capabilities.[260][261] stargate is a potential artificial intelligence supercomputer in development by microsoft and openai, in collaboration with oracle, softbank, and mgx.[262][263] stargate is designed as part of a greater data center project, which could represent an investment of as much as $100 billion by microsoft.[264] stargate is reported to be part of a series of ai related construction projects planned in the next few years by the companies microsoft and openai.[264] the supercomputers will be constructed in five phases.[262] the fourth phase should consist in a smaller openai supercomputer, planned to launch around 2026.[262] stargate is the fifth and final phase of the program, and will take five and six years to complete and is slated to launch around 2028.[264] the artificial intelligence of stargate is slated to be contained on millions of special server chips.[264] the supercomputer's data center will be built in the us across 700 acres of land.[264] it has a planned power consumption of 5 gigawatts, for which it could rely on nuclear energy.[264] the name "stargate" is a homage to the 1994 sci fi film stargate.[264] on november 17, 2023, sam altman was removed as ceo when its board of directors (composed of helen toner, ilya sutskever, adam d'angelo and tasha mccauley) cited a lack of confidence in him. chief technology officer mira murati took over as interim ceo. greg brockman, the president of openai, was also removed as chairman of the board[265][266] and resigned from the company's presidency shortly thereafter.[267] three senior openai researchers subsequently resigned: director of research and gpt 4 lead jakub pachocki, head of ai risk aleksander mądry [pl], and researcher szymon sidor.[268][269] on november 18, 2023, there were reportedly talks of altman returning as ceo amid pressure placed upon the board by investors such as microsoft and thrive capital, who objected to altman's departure.[270] although altman himself spoke in favor of returning to openai, he has since stated that he considered starting a new company and bringing former openai employees with him if talks to reinstate him didn't work out.[271] the board members agreed "in principle" to resign if altman returned.[272] on november 19, 2023, negotiations with altman to return failed and murati was replaced by emmett shear as interim ceo.[273] the board initially contacted anthropic ceo dario amodei (a former openai executive) about replacing altman, and proposed a merger of the two companies, but both offers were declined.[274] on november 20, 2023, microsoft ceo satya nadella announced altman and brockman would be joining microsoft to lead a new advanced ai research team, but added that they were still committed to openai despite recent events.[275] before the partnership with microsoft was finalized, altman gave the board another opportunity to negotiate with him.[276] about 738 of openai's 770 employees, including murati and sutskever, signed an open letter stating they would quit their jobs and join microsoft if the board did not rehire altman and then resign.[277][278] this prompted openai investors to consider legal action against the board as well.[279] in response, openai management sent an internal memo to employees stating that negotiations with altman and the board had resumed and would take some time.[280] on november 21, 2023, after continued negotiations, altman and brockman returned to the company in their prior roles along with a reconstructed board made up of new members bret taylor (as chairman) and lawrence summers, with d'angelo remaining.[281] on november 22, 2023, emerging reports suggested that sam altman's dismissal from openai may have been linked to his alleged mishandling of a significant breakthrough in the organization's secretive project codenamed q*. according to sources within openai, q* is aimed at developing ai capabilities in logical and mathematical reasoning, and reportedly involves performing math on the level of grade school students.[282][283][284] concerns about altman's response to this development, specifically regarding the discovery's potential safety implications, were reportedly raised with the company's board shortly before altman's firing.[285] on november 29, 2023, openai announced that an anonymous microsoft employee had joined the board as a non voting member to observe the company's operations;[286] microsoft resigned from the board in july 2024.[287] in january 2023, openai has been criticized for outsourcing the annotation of data sets to sama, a company based in san francisco that employed workers in kenya. these annotations were used to train an ai model to detect toxicity, which could then be used to moderate toxic content, notably from chatgpt's training data and outputs. however, these pieces of text usually contained detailed descriptions of various types of violence, including sexual violence. the investigation uncovered that openai began sending snippets of data to sama as early as november 2021. the four sama employees interviewed by time described themselves as mentally scarred. openai paid sama $12.50 per hour of work, and sama was redistributing the equivalent of between $1.32 and $2.00 per hour post tax to its annotators. sama's spokesperson said that the $12.50 was also covering other implicit costs, among which were infrastructure expenses, quality assurance and management.[288] in march 2023, the company was also criticized for disclosing particularly few technical details about products like gpt 4, contradicting its initial commitment to openness and making it harder for independent researchers to replicate its work and develop safeguards. openai cited competitiveness and safety concerns to justify this strategic turn. openai's former chief scientist ilya sutskever argued in 2023 that open sourcing increasingly capable models was increasingly risky, and that the safety reasons for not open sourcing the most potent ai models would become "obvious" in a few years.[289] on may 17, 2024, a vox article reported that openai was asking departing employees to sign a lifelong non disparagement agreement forbidding them from criticizing openai or acknowledging the existence of the agreement. daniel kokotajlo, a former employee, publicly stated that he forfeited his vested equity in openai in order to leave without signing the agreement.[290][291] sam altman stated that he was unaware of the equity cancellation provision, and that openai never enforced it to cancel any employee's vested equity.[292] vox published leaked documents and emails challenging this claim.[293] on may 23, 2024, openai sent a memo releasing former employees from the agreement.[294] openai was sued for copyright infringement by authors sarah silverman, matthew butterick, paul tremblay and mona awad in july 2023.[295][296][297] in september 2023, 17 authors, including george r. r. martin, john grisham, jodi picoult and jonathan franzen, joined the authors guild in filing a class action lawsuit against openai, alleging that the company's technology was illegally using their copyrighted work.[298][299] the new york times also sued the company in late december 2023.[296][300] in may 2024 it was revealed that openai had destroyed its books1 and books2 training datasets, which were used in the training of gpt 3, and which the authors guild believed to have contained over 100,000 copyrighted books.[301] in 2021, openai developed a speech recognition tool called whisper. openai used it to transcribe more than one million hours of youtube videos into text for training gpt 4. the automated transcription of youtube videos raised concerns within openai employees regarding potential violations of youtube's terms of service, which prohibit the use of videos for applications independent of the platform, as well as any type of automated access to its videos. despite these concerns, the project proceeded with notable involvement from openai's president, greg brockman. the resulting dataset proved instrumental in training gpt 4.[302] in february 2024, the intercept as well as raw story and alternate media inc. filed lawsuit against openai on copyright litigation ground.[303][304] the lawsuit is said to have charted a new legal strategy for digital only publishers to sue openai.[305] on april 30, 2024, eight newspapers filed a lawsuit in the southern district of new york against openai and microsoft, claiming illegal harvesting of their copyrighted articles. the suing publications included the mercury news, the denver post, the orange county register, st. paul pioneer press, chicago tribune, orlando sentinel, sun sentinel, and new york daily news.[306] in april 2023, the eu's european data protection board (edpb) formed a dedicated task force on chatgpt "to foster cooperation and to exchange information on possible enforcement actions conducted by data protection authorities" based on the "enforcement action undertaken by the italian data protection authority against open ai about the chat gpt service".[307] in late april 2024 noyb filed a complaint with the austrian datenschutzbehörde against openai for violating the european general data protection regulation. a text created with chatgpt gave a false date of birth for a living person without giving the individual the option to see the personal data used in the process. a request to correct the mistake was denied. additionally, neither the recipients of chatgpt's work nor the sources used, could be made available, openai claimed.[308] openai was criticized for lifting its ban on using chatgpt for "military and warfare". up until january 10, 2024, its "usage policies" included a ban on "activity that has high risk of physical harm, including," specifically, "weapons development" and "military and warfare." its new policies prohibit "[using] our service to harm yourself or others" and to "develop or use weapons".[309][310] as one of the industry collaborators, openai provides llm to the artificial intelligence cyber challenge (aixcc) sponsored by defense advanced research projects agency (darpa) and advanced research projects agency for health to protect software critical to americans.[311] in october 2024, the intercept revealed that openai's tools are considered "essential" for africom's mission and included in an "exception to fair opportunity" contractural agreement between the united states department of defense and microsoft.[107] in december 2024, openai said it would partner with defense tech company anduril to build drone defense technologies for the united states and its allies.[312] in june 2023, a lawsuit claimed that openai scraped 300 billion words online without consent and without registering as a data broker. it was filed in san francisco, california, by sixteen anonymous plaintiffs.[313] they also claimed that openai and its partner as well as customer microsoft continued to unlawfully collect and use personal data from millions of consumers worldwide to train artificial intelligence models.[314] on may 22, 2024, openai entered into an agreement with news corp to integrate news content from the wall street journal, the new york post, the times, and the sunday times into its ai platform. meanwhile, other publications like the new york times chose to sue openai and microsoft for copyright infringement over the use of their content to train ai models.[315] in november 2024, a coalition of canadian news outlets, including the toronto star, metroland media, postmedia, the globe and mail, the canadian press and cbc, sued openai for using their news articles to train its software without permission.[316] suchir balaji, a former researcher at openai, was found dead in his san francisco apartment on november 26, 2024. the police ruled that there was "no evidence of foul play" found during the initial investigation,[123] and the san francisco medical examiner's office confirmed the cause of death as suicide.[317][318] however, the circumstances surrounding his death have sparked controversy and allegations of foul play. balaji had publicly criticized openai for what he perceived as breaches of copyright law in the development of chatgpt, which led to his resignation from the company in august 2024.[319] following his death, his mother, poornima ramarao, contested the official narrative. she claimed that there were signs of a struggle in the apartment, including blood patterns inconsistent with suicide, and that the apartment appeared ransacked.[320] ramarao, along with balaji's family, hired private investigators and conducted a second autopsy, which they claim contradicted the police's findings.[321] as of january 17, 2025, the family's allegations have gained widespread attention, with figures like elon musk and silicon valley congressman ro khanna publicly calling for further investigation into the possibility of foul play.[320][322][323]

elon musk wants to “understand the true nature of the universe.” at least that’s what his new ai company, xai, said on its website as he announced its formation on wednesday. announcing formation of @xai to understand reality musk incorporated xai in nevada in march this year and reportedly purchased “roughly 10,000 graphics processing units” hardware that is required to develop and run state of the art ai systems. the company has not said how it is financed but the financial times reported in april that musk was discussing getting funding from investors in spacex and tesla, two companies he runs. the company has not shared much detail about its intentions, but said on its website that its team would be joining a twitter spaces call on july 14 to take questions. (musk is the owner of twitter.) the ai company will work closely with twitter, now called x corp., and tesla, as well as other companies “to make progress towards our mission,” xai said on its website. the team at xai, led by musk, includes former employees of prominent ai companies openai and deepmind, as well as microsoft and tesla. dan hendrycks, director of the center for ai safety, is listed as an adviser. the center for ai safety has been highly vocal about safety concerns. the organization released a statement signed by hundreds of ai scientists and experts, as well as the ceos of some of the top ai companies in may, which said that “mitigating the risk of extinction from ai should be a global priority alongside other societal scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” demis hassabis, ceo of deepmind, sam altman ceo of openai, and dario amodei, ceo of anthropic were among the signatories. musk did not sign the centre for ai safety statement, but he did sign an open letter published in march by the future of life institute, which called on ai companies to “immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of ai systems more powerful than gpt 4.” musk was one of the founding chairs of openai, along with altman, openai’s ceo. musk was among a group of investors, including altman, greg brockman, reid hoffman, jessica livingston, peter thiel, amazon web services, infosys, and yc research, who committed $1 billion to fund openai in 2015. musk has said he contributed $100 million of this $1 billion, but has also put the figure at half that. read more: a brief history of elon musk saying one thing and doing another at twitter the circumstances of musk’s departure aren’t entirely clear. according to an openai blog post and later tweets by musk, he left openai in 2018 to prevent conflicts of interest as tesla became more focused on ai. semafor reported in march that musk had proposed that he assume leadership of openai, and walked away after his proposal was rejected. the financial times reported in april that musk’s departure was also due to clashes with other board members and staff over openai’s approach to ai safety. since he left in 2018, musk has been critical of the direction openai has taken. in an interview with tucker carlson on fox news in april, musk said of the company “they are now closed source, and they are obviously for profit, and closely allied with microsoft.” microsoft and openai have a multibillion dollar partnership, which grants openai use of microsoft’s cloud computing capacity in exchange for openai’s artificial intelligence systems powering microsoft’s products. in march, musk tweeted “i’m still confused as to how a non profit to which i donated ~$100m somehow became a $30b market cap for profit. if this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it?” openai has previously said that it moved from non profit status to a “hybrid of a for profit and nonprofit” because the computational demands of training state of the art ai systems mean that openai would need to raise more funding than would be available to a standard non profit. in the april interview with carlson, musk also said he was worried that ai models are being trained to be “politically correct,” and pledged to create a “truth gpt,” which he said would be a “maximum truth seeking ai.” read more: elon musk is bringing the culture wars to ai musk, who has frequently spoken about the risks posed by advanced ai systems in the past, also said in the interview that he was founding a new ai organization to prevent “ai dystopia.” however, experts and researchers, including xai adviser hendrycks, have expressed concerns that the addition of another highly resourced company to the ai ecosystem could further fuel the race to develop powerful ai systems, at the expense of efforts to make them safe. read more: the ai arms race is changing everything in april, in response to reports that musk would likely start a new ai company, hendrycks wrote that the “emergence of a new major ai developer will likely increase competitive pressures,” and that the “pressures to race ahead can cause actors to make sacrifices, especially when there are tradeoffs between safety and competitiveness.” on wednesday, in a discussion on twitter spaces with congressmen ro khanna and mike gallagher, musk reaffirmed that his approach to creating safe ai would be based on the ai being truth seeking. from an ai safety standpoint, a maximally curious ai, one that is trying to understand the universe, is going to be pro humanity,” musk said. “from the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not humanity.” jess whittlestone, head of ai policy at the centre for long term resilience, a u.k. based think tank, told time in an email that this is “a pretty unorthodox (and i think quite naive) approach to ai safety. i’m not sure we can even say clearly what it would mean for an ai to be “maximally curious” and it’s a huge leap to assume that this means an ai will be pro humanity. the whole challenge right now is that we cannot fully understand these ai models or predict their behavior, and i don’t see anything in musk’s approach which suggests it will solve that.” write to will henshall at will.henshall@time.com

hey everyone, how did openai go so wrong? the lawsuit we saw coming. sam altman nearly drunk with his own importance. promises to serve humanity, so easy to abuse. mottos and dreams and a great deception. is q* agi? read the latest lawsuit by elon musk. limited time only. get 30% off forever these 54 seconds explain why elon is suing openai and sam altman:

download the full report here in the spring of 2019, at a live event for strictlyvc, the technology journalist connie loizos asked sam altman how the unusually structured company he ran planned on generating revenue. “openai is so amorphous,” she said. “but it is a business.” was the aim, she wondered, to license its technology, or customize algorithms for paying clients? “how is it going to work?”1 “the honest answer is that we have no idea,” altman replied. “we have never made any revenue, we have no current plans to make revenue, we have no idea how we may one day generate revenue. we have made a soft promise to investors that ‘once we’ve built this sort of generally intelligent system, basically we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return for you.’”2 the room rippled with laughter, but altman was serious. “it sounds like an episode of silicon valley, it really does, i get it, you can laugh it’s all right,” he said. “but it is what i actually believe is gonna happen.”3 altman’s comment is telling. it contains at least two key truths about openai, the company that has spearheaded the generative ai boom now dominant in silicon valley and the broader business world. first, before openai released dall e and chatgpt, the two buzzy products that would transform it into a household name, it had no business model at all. second, its executive leadership believed that the development of its ultimate core product, an artificial general intelligence (agi), would solve the issue; profits would follow. this combination a lack of a premeditated business model and an insistence on referring the public, partners, and investors to its pursuit of agi, an aspirational technological construct, as its raison d’être, in its stead has shaped openai’s path to becoming the definitive silicon valley unicorn of the 2020s. this report set out to investigate and elucidate the business models behind the generative ai companies that are drawing hundreds of billions of dollars in investment. such models have pushed companies like nvidia, which supplies the chips necessary for ai computation, to double and then triple its $418 billion valuation in 2022 to a historic market capitalization in excess of $3 trillion in 2024.4 it soon became clear that understanding the composition of those business models meant understanding the deployment and evolution of the concept of “agi” as a lodestar for generative ai companies. any effort to understand openai’s business model and that of its emulators, peers, and competitors must thus begin with the understanding that they have been developed rapidly, even haphazardly, and out of necessity, to capitalize on the popularity of generative ai products, to fund growing compute costs, and to pacify a growing portfolio of investors and stakeholders. equally crucial is understanding how “agi” operates in a material context, and how it serves as a driver of continued investment and enterprise sales, a marketing and recruitment tool, and a framework for bolstering the company’s influence and cultural footprint. that openai had no discernible business model upon its inception does not mean that profit potential wasn’t a consideration from the beginning. while the headlines announcing openai’s launch reliably painted the project as elon musk and sam altman’s humanitarian effort to protect the world from a malignant, superpowerful ai, it was from the start a densely corporatized undertaking, established in a posh hotel in the middle of silicon valley with seed money from tech billionaires, amazon, and top venture capitalists despite being labeled a “nonprofit.” there’s no reason to doubt that altman was answering earnestly when he declared to loizos that openai had no business model to speak of. it wasn’t a pressing issue. why? for one thing, this was the end of the 2010s, a decade in which the tech sector enjoyed rock bottom federal interest rates and it was never easier for founders and startups to attract funding; as a result, much of silicon valley’s investor class had grown accustomed to making bets that promised scale, grandeur, and “unicorn” status over reliable marginal returns and sound business plans. in fact, we might consider openai the apotheosis of a trend that rose to prominence with startups like uber and wework, formed in the heady post web 2.0 era. it was a time when highly salable products like the iphone and ad based google search ruled the tech sector, and when it was assumed that software would eat the world with such ferocity that few people worried about overhead or operating costs. that picture had changed dramatically by the 2020s. the federal reserve began raising interest rates in december 2015 incidentally, the same month that altman announced the launch of openai after seven years of keeping them near zero in the wake of the great recession.5 the hikes ended the era of free money for silicon valley, and investment in startups began to slow. the higher credit rates quickly made clear that tech had another issue on its hands: it hadn’t had a truly hit product category in years. facebook, google, and the iphone had all risen to prominence more than a decade ago; uber, lyft, and other gig economy companies were still not profitable, and a cascade of broadly hyped tech trends crypto, web3, the metaverse crashed and burned in rapid succession. waves of layoffs hit the industry in 2022 and 2023, and silicon valley was, for the first time in a generation, at risk of entering into a recession. these are the conditions into which the ai boom was born. and that boom, launched by a company built on the assumptions and logics of the zero percent interest rate era, with presumed access to vast stores of investment, soon acquired an urgent need for a product to sell to users and corporate clients. in the rush to capitalize on its rise to prominence, ai companies, especially openai, would wield a story about a technology so powerful it would soon have a life of its own so powerful you could simply ask it how to make more money, and it would oblige. all of this converged to give rise to the modern generative ai trend. the business model, it could safely be assumed, would come later. to understand the thrust and structure of the business models taking shape in the generative ai space, we need to understand openai, the driving force that most if not all of the new companies are reacting to, emulating, or feeding off. openai is at the center of nearly every conversation about the technology, both inside the industry and out. with a self reported $3.4 billion in annualized revenue projected this year,6 it’s the largest company operating in the space, with the highest valuation: $157 billion, based on its most recent funding round.7 meanwhile, openai’s most similarly constituted competitor, anthropic (which says it’s on track to make $850 million in revenue this year8), was founded by former openai employees, as was the much hyped “answer engine” perplexity. microsoft is openai’s closest partner, lending it $10 billion in funds and cloud compute, and getting a chatgpt powered copilot out of the deal, while google and facebook hastily launched product development cycles of their own in response to the shock waves sent out by chatgpt in late 2022 and early 2023. we lead with the case study of openai, and interrogate how it’s a rather immaculate product of its time and place: unicorn hunting era silicon valley and the decade of zero percent interest rates. “if you think about the things that are most important to the future of the world, i think good ai is probably one of the highest things on that list. so we are creating openai,” sam altman told veteran tech journalist steven levy in 2015, in an interview announcing the company. “the organization is trying to develop a human positive ai. and because it’s a non profit, it will be freely owned by the world.”9 to anyone unfamiliar with the historical context of openai’s founding mission, the notion that the $157 billion company, which has raised the largest vc round in history,10 and whose revenue comes from selling enterprise software and api access to corporations like pwc, is a “nonprofit” that will be “freely owned by the world” may seem jarring. therefore, it’s worth charting its evolution from nonprofit to very much for profit an important piece of the puzzle because this evolution is what has effectively eroded the boundary between mythology and business model. openai began as a grandiose, science fiction adjacent, and high concept venture whose aim was explicit in its ambitions: to ensure that superpowerful agi was developed safely, in a way that would benefit all humanity. the purported gravity of this mission was such that, for years, it eschewed a business model altogether (an approach also subsidized by the beneficiaries of the unicorn era of heavy vc investment). as such, openai’s eventual $157 billion valuation marks a milestone: it is the first modern tech giant birthed with a promise that what it was doing was so momentous that it need not consider revenue at all it would be a nonprofit. silicon valley has long had a penchant for grandiosity, but if we’re charting the ratio of its world changing talk to demonstrable business feasibility, from, say, apple, which helped mint the practice of cosmic sales pitches yet still sold hardware in retail shops; to uber, whose talk of disruption was ubiquitous, whose app was popular, but whose bottom line math was always fuzzy; to openai, then perhaps we can see the moment when the cart is placed fully before the horse: when the story of a venture, the story of a new technology with commercial potential, eclipsed the need for a business model at all. but the story starts in earnest before openai is even founded, when “superintelligent ai” is a trending area of interest and concern among silicon valley elites11 and, as we’ll see, arguably a way for late entrants in the space to gain competitive advantage. in the 2010s, the commercial ai space was dominated by google and facebook, which were each investing in machine learning technologies and competing to acquire promising startups like deepmind and to hire top talent like geoffrey hinton. analysts like musk’s biographer, bloomberg reporter ashlee vance, have argued that this made musk professionally jealous. publicly, musk may have worried about ai safety; privately, his concerns may have been more about missing out on a major developing tech trend and business opportunity.12 a widely documented argument between musk and former google ceo sergey brin over whether ai would benefit or threaten humanity is sometimes cited as the starting point for openai.13 yet it is important to note that musk had personal and financial reasons to oppose the commercial development of ai by google or the other tech giants. to understand the genesis of openai, we consider the likelihood that the company was never the altruistic venture it portrayed itself as to the media despite being formed as a nonprofit but rather a vehicle through which musk and altman could achieve various personal and business objectives, including stalling google’s progress on ai and positioning openai to be a more attractive alternative in the eyes of top research talent, consumers, and thus investors. elon musk meets the founder of deepmind, demis hassabis, who, according to multiple accounts, sparks his interest in ai by detailing the risks it poses to humanity.14 musk invests $5 million in the company. musk meets sam altman, then a partner at influential startup incubator y combinator. google expresses interest in acquiring deepmind. musk discusses ai at his birthday party in napa with google cofounder larry page.15 musk is reportedly envious of google’s dominance in ai, and his formerly close relationship with page is fraying. he reportedly argues that page is not cautious enough with ai; the two have a falling out. musk attempts to dissuade hassabis from selling to google.16 google announces it has acquired deepmind for $500 million.17 musk makes headlines by declaring ai to be “our biggest existential threat” during an interview at mit, among the first of his documented statements about the power of malign ai.18 altman, now president of y combinator, begins exchanging emails with musk about ai. “development of superhuman machine intelligence,” altman writes on his personal blog in february, “is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.”19 altman emails musk in may proposing they start an ai lab together. “thinking a lot about whether it’s possible to stop humanity from developing ai. i think the answer is almost definitely not. if it’s going to happen, it seems like it would be good for someone other than google to do it first.”20 musk and altman organize a dinner at the silicon valley dealmaking hot spot the rosewood hotel with leading ai researchers and founders to discuss starting that lab. musk leads an open letter calling for a ban on ai weapons.21 altman and musk recruit stripe cto greg brockman and notable ai researcher ilya sutskever, among others, and begin forming openai. in an email discussing the announcement of openai, elon musk writes: “i’d favor positioning the blog to appeal a bit more to the general public there is a lot of value to having the public root for us to succeed and then having a longer, more detailed and inside baseball version for recruiting, with a link to it at the end of the general public version.”22 openai publicly launches with a stated mission of developing ai “in a way most likely to benefit humanity as a whole,” to widespread media interest.23 from the outset, while publicly positioned as a nonprofit, openai was structured and anticipated by its founders as having the potential for profit, or at least the potential to wield influence. while there was no business model, openai served a distinct business purpose: suppressing musk’s competitors and offering the ambitious altman a bridge to musk one of the wealthiest and most influential figures in silicon valley and his circle of allies. one lens through which to view the emergence of “agi” or “human level ai” or “superintelligent ai” as a widespread discussion point is thus as the result of a business and retaliatory tactic leveraged by musk and embraced by altman, as an effort to lash out against or even attempt to suppress development and/or deployment of commercial ai products by google in particular. this positioning also benefits the institution or company whose public aim is to develop and deploy ai “safely” which happens to be openai’s founding mission. this tactic may have proved successful. google, after all, had developed many key frameworks and technologies, like tensorflow, an open source machine learning software library; and the “transformer” that gives the general pre trained transformer in chatgpt its name. it had a yearslong head start on openai on llm technology: in 2013 hinton brought his machine learning acumen to google, which acquired deepmind the following year, introduced lamda in 2020, and developed bard and gemini in 2023. in 2016, just months after becoming ceo, sundar pichai announced that google would become “an ai first” company.24 yet openai ate its lunch. this is partly because google had stepped on a series of rakes in its commercial ai development, gaining a reputation for releasing “creepy” products and silencing critical ai researchers, both internally and externally. in 2020, the company pushed out star ai ethicist timnit gebru after preventing her now seminal paper “on the dangers of stochastic parrots: can language models be too big?” from being published.25 in 2022, it fired software engineer blake lemoine, who went public with his fears that google’s internal chatbot products had become sentient.26 as a result, the company did not release a similar chatbot product to openai, in part out of fear that such a product would result in public anxiety and bad press.27 google issued a “code red” internally after openai’s chatgpt exploded in popularity at the end of 2022, and raced to catch up by releasing a competing product. there is also a lesson here about the importance of developing a corporate narrative: by the mid 2010s, google, the object of public ire and rounds of bad publicity for releasing google glass and for revelations that it crawled your inbox to improve ad suggestions (both of which the public felt violated privacy concerns), had a reputation for being invasive; when it released an early voice activated ai chatbot product called duplex, it caused controversy and backlash.28 after years of nurturing its image as concerned custodians of safe ai, openai suffered little such blowback. with this context, that openai’s founding mission was guided by distinct business objectives, we can consider the nature of that founding mission to build a safe, human level ai that would benefit everyone and how it evolved. or at least, the story of that founding mission. elon musk certainly knew well the benefit of having a narrative behind his companies; spacex would catapult humanity into a multiplanetary species, tesla was helping to save the world from climate change. openai would save it from super powerful ai. and at a time when investors were bankrolling otherwise underwater but extremely ambitious startups like uber, lyft, instacart, and wework companies that lost money every year but promised massive scale and disruption the story was crucial. “there is a lot of value,” as musk put it in one of his emails to fellow openai founders, “in having the public root for us to succeed.”29 next, we’ll examine the recent historical context of openai’s founding mission, which appears so jarring now, and chart its evolution from nonprofit to very much for profit. it’s an evolution that has been buffeted by low interest rates that infused the sv ecosystem with its most adventuring mindset, and eroded the boundary between mythology and business model. when openai launched, it described itself as a “nonprofit artificial intelligence research company” whose mission was “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.”30 its initial financial backers included musk,31 altman, brockman, peter thiel, linkedin founder reid hoffman, the indian it company infosys, y combinator, and amazon web services. its stated aim was to be able to hire top ai researchers from high paying gigs like google to conduct research like a nonprofit while paying for profit salaries. openai’s launch announcement raised the alarm, once again, of an incipient superintelligent ai, though this time it referred to the concept as “human level ai.” its very first post declared: “it’s hard to fathom how much human level ai could benefit society, and it’s equally hard to imagine how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly.”32 from the outset, openai’s dramatic mission struck a chord with the tech press, in no small part due to musk’s involvement, and, to a lesser extent, altman’s. taking cues from the organization’s first press release and interviews with key players given at the time, the media described the project as a heroic, even utopian, effort. “elon musk and partners form nonprofit to stop ai from ruining the world,” read a headline in the verge.33 “tech giants pledge $1bn for ‘altruistic ai’ venture, openai,” said another on the bbc’s website.34 vanity fair described openai as “a non profit company to save the world from a dystopian future.”35 and levy’s interview with altman was titled “how elon musk and y combinator plan to stop computers from taking over.” altman and musk thus imprinted onto the tech press and the general public the notion that openai would be dedicated to the cause of developing a “safe” superintelligent ai, free of a profit motive.36 it made for a compelling narrative unlike the gargantuan google or monolithic microsoft, here were researchers uninterested in making money but all in on protecting the world from a technology so powerful it could lead to humanity’s ruin if poorly stewarded. altman even told levy that openai would be “open source and usable by everyone.”37 it is remarkable, with the gift of hindsight, how little musk’s or altman’s motives were interrogated at the time. this also marks the early deployment of openai’s key marketing terms, like “safe ai,” “open,” “beneficial to all of humanity,” and “superpowerful” in hindsight, we can now consider these marketing terms from the outset. especially pertinent is the shift in focus from “open source” and “safe” ai, terms handy for spinning up headlines and attracting goodwill and idealistic, talented researchers, to “creating agi,” which would come to be central to openai’s language, and which is a mission that promises a more proactive development of powerful technology and one that might benefit your business.38 it may be useful to consider the central term of art here. artificial intelligence was itself originally coined as a marketing phrase. “i invented the term artificial intelligence,” ai pioneer john mccarthy said in the 1973 lighthall debate, “and i invented it because we had to do something when we were trying to get money for a summer study in 1956.”39 the term was devised, in other words, to appeal to funders. it is also worth noting that ai researchers in the 1960s and ’70s already meant “agi” when they said “ai” many luminaries in the field made predictions that an artificial intelligence that could do anything a human could do would emerge within a generation at the latest.40 the looseness of this terminology was capitalized on by early computer firms like ibm, which invested in the space; and was promulgated in pop culture, perhaps most famously in 2001: a space odyssey, which took place in the year ai scientists believed human level ai would arise. ai has in other words been deployed as a marketing term for decades, as computational linguistics scholar emily bender and others have argued at length.41 but if it is primarily a marketing term one used to describe a category of technical sciences and product development so broad it approaches meaninglessness then it’s also a familiar one, and one less capable of exciting the interests of investors and the public. it was in need of an upgrade and agi, not just artificial intelligence, but a powerful general intelligence that can do whatever a human can, fit the bill. the term “artificial general intelligence” was coined by mark gubrud in a 1997 paper as a means of describing an ai distinct from the narrower “expert systems” that had come to dominate the field after those earlier lofty predictions of intelligent software failed to come to pass.42 the term was revived in the 2010s.43 eventually, openai along with much of the tech industry would seize on the term and render it central to their marketing efforts. here’s an overview of this evolution. openai publicly launched as a nonprofit with the self described mission of developing a “safe,” “human level,” open sourced ai that would “benefit all of humanity,” emphasizing it had no financial incentive. just before it announces a restructuring into a for profit entity, openai publishes a charter centering its mission as bringing about “agi,” explicitly casting this as the primary goal. after the specter of agi is raised, openai releases to the press a text model it says is too dangerous to release to the public, taking full advantage of the social imaginary of a looming agi. the press publicizes both the model, which is impressive, and openai’s prudence in exercising caution over its own creation, making “the ai that’s too dangerous to release” a phenomenon in the tech media. months later, openai announces a $1 billion deal with microsoft, again touting its pursuit of agi. openai launched as a nonprofit positioned to fulfill a business objective, was from the start rich with profit making potential, and deployed marketing terms to create a narrative about its altruistic pursuit of building a “safe” “agi.” it is immaterial whether or not the participants in this venture believe in the risks of ai many clearly do but these risks serve marketing purposes regardless. if an ai product may be all powerful, it is all the more alluring to executives and managers who hope to harness it to increase productivity and save labor costs. from the start, openai has positioned itself to be the only reliable steward of this dangerous agi adjacent technology and so we should trust only them when the time comes to sell it. tracing the usage of the term “agi” in openai’s marketing materials, patterns emerge. the term is most often deployed at crucial junctures in the company’s fundraising history, or when it serves the company to remind the media of the stakes of its mission. openai first made agi a focus of official company business in 2018, when it released its charter, just after it announced elon musk’s departure; and again as it is negotiating investment from microsoft and preparing to restructure as a for profit company. in january 2023, just over a month after the launch of chatgpt, when the technology was still rapidly ascendent it would be the fastest app to climb to 100 million users, according to the company openai and microsoft announced a $10 billion partnership that openai stated “will allow us to continue our independent research and develop ai that is increasingly safe, useful, and powerful.”66 there is no mention of agi explicitly. two months later, when chatgpt was sufficiently publicized and perhaps even beginning to plateau in user growth, and when microsoft had an interest in publicizing its own chatgpt powered products, its researchers published a paper announcing that chatgpt 4 showed “sparks” of agi.67 openai is nearly the precise inverse of what it initially promised to be instead of open source and nonprofit, structured to avoid any single person taking too much power over this supposedly all powerful technology, it has evolved into a company that is highly proprietary and explicitly for profit, with a single person, ceo sam altman, exerting near total control over the operation. yet this is little remarked upon in the media, or by business analysts, with the somewhat ironic exception of elon musk, who filed a suit alleging that by transitioning into a for profit, non open source entity, openai violated the terms of his initial funding. openai burst into public consciousness and into the headlines in late 2022 after its public release of chatgpt, which would come to be synonymous with the new booming product category of generative ai. throughout 2023, silicon valley and many other industries, led by consultancies and finance reoriented itself around the most hyped technology it had seen in years: chatbots, image generators, audio synthesizers, and other ai products rolled out from startups and established giants. ai became the single dominant trend in tech, and bent all other products to its arc. generative ai caught the public’s eye with flashy tech demos, which openai executives rapidly translated into hype for the new services, and for the power of ai in general. the hype reached apocalyptic levels, replete with altman making a tour through washington and european capitals, apparently leading a public charge for regulation; testifying to the power of the technology; and making himself the point person for corporate ai policy. the mythology constructed since openai’s founding can be seen paying dividends throughout 2023. the agi construct can also be used as a device for blunting scandals, or for reminding investors of openai’s ultimate business objective. for instance, in may 2024, when openai endured a string of its most stinging scandals the most notable being scarlett johansson accusing the company of mimicking her voice without consent68 the company responded by announcing a new safety council and a new “frontier model” to help create agi: “openai has recently begun training its next frontier model and we anticipate the resulting systems to bring us to the next level of capabilities on our path to agi.”69 by 2024, the evolution of agi into purely a marketing term, disconnected entirely from the research sphere, was complete. openai hailed the launch of an automated customer support company called mavenagi, built with its gpt technology, on the official company website: “mavenagi is a new software company for the ai era.”70 over the decades “ai” had become rote, familiar, and so broadly understood as to be meaningless. agi could be seen as a marketing friendly reclamation of the concept to differentiate a new raft of products from a decades old discipline. and if agi was the marketing driver, then generative ai was the demo ideally suited to communicate its potential. its “magical” autogenerated images, uncanny valley videos, and a chatbot that mimicked human user behavior in its presentation (with its flickering cursor and sentences being typed out in real time as if by a supersmart person behind the scenes) gave the impression that this was humanity, augmented. the success of the dall e and chatgpt demos meant that the early business interest would be in automating text, code, and image generation and in automating creative labor. it would incentivize ai companies to shape their business models to capitalize on this interest, and to conform their pursuits of enterprise deals to this narrative. openai helped construct an imaginary where an agi of great power looms on the horizon one that can do anything a human can, at least in the digital world and offered a suite of demonstrations as evidence. for all the wonder they sparked, the clearest path to a business model seemed to be articulating the capacity for agi to automate human labor. indeed, that was how it was redefined in openai’s 2018 charter: agi remains defined by openai as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.”71 while it was still unclear as to what most generative ai companies’ precise business models would be, investment was unleashed nonetheless. investment in “ai” from 2010 to 2015, according to cb insights, totalled less than $1 billion combined, though it did increase dramatically, from $45 million in 2010 to $310 million in 2015.72 over the 2010s, investment in ai was ongoing, if targeted at “narrow” ai companies aimed at generating production and manufacturing efficiencies notable startups included vicarious but it was a mere fraction of what the boom of 2023 would unleash. according to an oecd report, “between 2015 and 2023, global vc investments in ai start ups tripled (from usd 31 billion to usd 98 billion), with investments in generative ai specifically growing from 1% of total ai vc investments in 2022 (usd 1.3 billion) to 18.2% (usd 17.8 billion) in 2023, despite cooling capital markets.”73 high profile investors include andreessen horowitz, or a16z, the largest vc firm by assets under management ($42 billion). a16z participated in openai’s $300 million fundraise in april 2023, and has since started a $6 billion fund focused on ai companies and “american dynamism.”74 it has invested in twenty ai startups; according to pitchbook, “a16z has made a play to own every part of the generative ai value chain.”75 most notably, it has invested $415 million in a series a round for french open source ai startup mistral. the valley’s second largest firm, sequoia capital, invested in openai in 2021, and in 2023 also unleashed a blitz of ai investment: $30 million in collaborative robotics’ series a, $28 million in hex technologies, $21 million in the legal ai firm harvey, $15m in closefactor, $12.2 million in generative video startup tavus, $5.5 million in the ai assistant company dust, $5.3 in replicate, and $3.2 in helm, a health ai startup. the firm says it has seventy ai companies in its portfolio.76 in sum, openai was likely conceived as a strategic hedge by elon musk and sam altman against google’s mounting claim to commercial ai dominance. it was positioned from the start to communicate its altruistic mission contra the for profit objectives of the tech giants of the day, despite itself being backed by and employed by figures from the largest silicon valley firms and venture capital outlets. by deploying the use of “agi” to elevate its mission beyond the stale concern of generations old “ai,” it was able to cultivate a cultural mystique that translated into a marketing device that could be wielded to reliably generate press, bolster recruitment of top researchers, and attract investment at crucial corporate junctures. thanks to the investment climate and the zero percent interest rate era, there was little concern over a business model being in place as openai’s leadership transitioned into a for profit the importance of a strong narrative and the involvement of central valley figures eclipsed the need for a plan to generate revenue. a precedent had been set by uber and other “unicorns” that investors and consumers would tolerate long term efforts to scale and to capture markets. openai was in command of easily the most compelling story about ai, and thus when its product chatgpt exploded in popularity, it was well poised to capitalize on its recent legacy of presenting itself as a steward of agi, which the company was itself allegedly developing. early competitors like anthropic would have to compete on grounds of “safety,” but this mattered less as the products reached cultural saturation and market interest became obvious in the generative ai product category, especially from enterprise clients. now, with widespread industry dedication and investment, and openai successfully at the center of the generative ai economy, a rush to discern what generative ai is actually capable of in a business context unfolded and continues to unfold even now. it appears certain that chatgpt’s rapid, whiplash success was something of a surprise to both the company and its partners. it was not part of a meticulous product roadmap in fact, openai board member helen toner has revealed that the board was not even informed in advance about chatgpt’s release; they found out, to their chagrin, on twitter along with everyone else.77 the app quickly notched 100 million users, causing industry analysts at banks and investment firms to swoon. “in 20 years following the internet space, we cannot recall a faster ramp in a consumer internet app,” ubs analysts wrote in a february 2023 report.78 to keep up with demand especially in server space, given the taxing compute requirements of running ai systems openai and microsoft expanded their partnership, with the software giant pledging an additional $10 billion in exchange for the right to use openai technology in its platforms and software offerings, and a cut of openai’s sales.79 (to those keeping track at home, that brought the total to around $13 billion, given past investments and pledges.) the details of this partnership have not been made public, but it is known to stake much of its value in the form of compute credits for azure, microsoft’s cloud compute service.80 it also requires open ai to use azure as its compute provider. openai’s embrace of microsoft and vice versa as it moved away from a research organization aimed at “protecting the world from ai” as per the early altman musk iteration, signals the startup’s ambition to take a more capital intensive approach than musk was able to offer. there are many reasons why microsoft might find a deal attractive, and why it’s ideally structured to be tolerant of a startup that has no immediate or obvious roads to profitability. first, since its earliest investments, openai can be seen as a hedge against google and facebook, each of which were outspending microsoft in house to develop ai systems. second, the structure of the deal (or what we know of it) ensures that microsoft will profit from nearly any outcome. microsoft benefits from using openai’s technology in its products, and receives a cut of revenue from the products openai sells as well buffering any financial risk, which is already curbed because, as noted above, much of the deal is understood to take the form of compute credits. as such, as recently as the summer of 2024, microsoft was able to publicly state that it was comfortable with sam altman’s vision of an incipient ai, and was not afraid to spend billions investing with no promise of profits in the near term the deal’s structure, and the dream of agi, are in ideal symbiosis. in 2023, after the openai microsoft deal was inked, interest in openai, generative ai, and large language models truly exploded. microsoft added gpt technology to bing and copilot; google announced bard, which later became gemini; and anthropic debuted claude, its chatgpt competitor, in march 2023.81 (in q3 2024, half of all venture capital investment in the us went to ai, up from 15 percent in 2017.82) openai’s first major move to shape a business model was the obvious one: it opened a premium paid tier for chatgpt called plus, offering higher performance for fans and superusers of the app. openai also started granting access to its api, allowing developers and companies to purchase api keys. within months, the company began leaning into enterprise sales, recognizing the potential in touting an all powerful technology that could also automate jobs. that spring, openai employees coauthored a report with cornell researchers about job impacts;83 while the paper was covered in the press as a warning, it had the effect, as many such impact papers do, of bolstering the automation technology’s job replacing bona fides. throughout the rest of 2023, openai floated other ideas for generating revenue, some with more conviction than others. it teased and eventually released an app store for gpt apps developed by independent programmers, as well as the ai video generator sora. altman nodded to the idea of selling ads against gpt output online. but the chief potential for revenue generation, and thus the core plank of its business model, remained tied to the same plank: selling enterprise tier gpts and selling api access. now we might see why the agi mythology is so important to the formulation here: managers can be assured that they are purchasing both the safest and the most powerful technology available as they seek to cut costs in a tight labor market. this is similar to the way in which the previous era of tech unicorns uber and the gig economy startups ultimately tried to attain profit by promising to reduce labor costs (in ridehail’s case, by disrupting the taxi and black cab economy) despite the buzzy rhetoric and lofty corporate mythologies. in this case, the talk of agi supersedes discussions of openai’s enterprise business in the press, making it a more palatable automation company. reduce tasks, use as leverage, replace jobs, increase attrition. nearly two years into the generative ai boom, this still holds true: enterprise clients, by the company’s own estimation, are the most valuable line of its business by a considerable margin. (openai’s sales figures aren’t public, but many of the major contracts inked so far are.) the largest client of openai is the consulting and financial services firm pwc, which has purchased 101,000 seats.84 the american biotech firm moderna,85 and klarna, a swedish fintech startup, are among other leading users; openai estimated 600,000 total enterprise clients as of the spring of 2024.86 by september, it reported one million.87 in june 2024, the company self reported its annualized revenue as $3.4 billion.88 yet openai’s overhead is staggering, making it notably different from the ‘zero price’ products that have otherwise dominated the modern tech industry. last summer, the company’s compute costs were reported to be $700,000 a day;89 they are certainly much larger now. sam altman publicly said he needs $7 trillion in investment for chips to run what he had planned for his ai programs.90 meanwhile, openai’s workforce is large, expensive, and expanding. research and development for llms requires vast investment, compute, and energy especially as openai pushes into video production. licensing deals with media companies for training data have cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars.91 multiple legal battles, against journalists and creative workers who allege openai has used their work without consent or compensation, are ongoing. and competitors are eating into the company’s market share. taken together, we see a portrait of a company that wrapped itself in an altruistic narrative mythology to attract researchers, investment, and press. it stumbled into a hit app that opened a pathway to a new product category in commercial generative ai (something silicon valley had been pursuing unsuccessfully for years), ignited a gold rush, drew competitors, and wielded its unique legacy and relationship to agi to differentiate itself. however, given that generative ai technology is so expensive to develop and run, a unique imperative to generate revenue lots of revenue in order to capitalize on its popularity, cultural cachet, and market opportunity has become the company’s dominant concern. (in the past, as mentioned earlier, openai has stated that its move away from nonprofit status was necessitated by the need for more compute power if it were to make satisfactory progress in creating agi. this can be seen instead as a move toward preparing for an era of commercial product releases, even if the company remained unprepared for the success of chatgpt when it arrived.) this is how a company transforms from a nonprofit whose aim is to be “owned by all of humanity” and “free of the profit motive” to one whose board is purged of safety experts in favor of larry summers. this frenzy to locate and craft a viable business model has had other consequences. ongoing and highly unresolved issues regarding copyright threaten the foundation of the industry: if content currently used in ai training models is found to be subject to copyright claims, top vcs investing in ai like marc andreessen say it could destroy the nascent industry. governments, citizens, and civil society advocates have had little time to prepare adequate policies for mitigating misinformation, ai biases, and economic disruptions caused by ai. furthermore, the haphazard nature of the ai industry’s rise means that by all appearances, another tech bubble is being rapidly inflated.92 so much investment has flowed into the space so fast, based on the bona fides of just a handful of companies especially openai, microsoft, google, and nvidia that a crash could prove highly disruptive, and have a ripple effect far beyond silicon valley. this is especially concerning because so much of the business, as we have seen, relies on large enterprise contracts and on using generative ai in a capacity as automation software for creative labor. given the unreliability, hallucinatory output, and security concerns still posed by even enterprise editions of the software, this makes the long term gambit of generative ai as efficiency generating, cost cutting, and productivity improving software a deeply dubious one. goldman sachs and sequoia capital have both authored reports suggesting that generative ai may not be worth the current investment. sequoia capital partner david cahn wrote that the generative ai industry would have to generate $600 billion in revenue annually to sustain the current rate of investment a long way to go when the biggest company in the space is making $3.4 billion a year.93 goldman sachs was even more blunt, finding that there was simply too much spend and too little benefit to justify the technology in most corporate environments.94 the wall street journal reported in july 2024 that firms had switched from discussing generative ai in terms of productivity gains perhaps in part because those gains were dubious or hard to quantify to analyzing its capacity for revenue generation.95 if that doesn’t pan out if companies find generative ai is coming up short on revenue it’s easy to see a mass dismissal of the technology among corporate firms after the trial periods expire and the hype wears off. given that generative ai has entered a new and crucial stage with large client acquisitions and investor concerns colliding, critics’ voices growing, no new major technology advancements released for months, and a howling imperative to start making money perhaps it’s no surprise that, once again, openai turned to centering its agi narrative. in july 2024, openai announced a five level system for evaluating its technologies on the road to human level intelligence.96 according to bloomberg, “the tiers, which openai plans to share with investors and others outside the company, range from the kind of ai available today that can interact in conversational language with people (level 1) to ai that can do the work of an organization (level 5).”97 notably, openai is still at level 2 its ai is a “reasoner” that can do “human level problem solving.” this positioning can be viewed as a resetting of expectations to corporate clients who might be getting itchy after seeing a few months with enterprise gpt fail to provide impressive results, a reminder that agi is still coming, that the systems are improving all the time so don’t cancel your contract with us just yet and a framework through which the company can whet the appetite of future clients. (note that altman has had to recalibrate his agi expectations before; in january 2024, he insisted that agi is coming, but “will change the world much less than we think,”98 perhaps another effort to tamp down expectations set by, well, himself, just a few months earlier, as corporate clients began to express frustration with the slow gains made by enterprise ai.) when agi arrives, openai promises, its ai won’t just be able to do a single worker’s job it will be able to do all of their jobs. the generative ai on offer at openai’s level 5 is an “ai that can do the work of an organization.”99 and that, ultimately, is what executives and management are pursuing, and have been pursuing, since the industrial revolution, when early entrepreneurs dreamt up the first fully mechanized factories completely automated operations producing output for the profit of the one at the helm, without the protests and inefficiencies of a human workforce. in fact, what agi artificial general intelligence that can carry out human level task making free of human inefficiencies is to ai researchers, the fully automated factory is to c suite executives and management consultancies: an ultimate ideal that may or may not be achievable, and yet serves as a powerful driver of interest and investment. this, perhaps, is also why the apocalyptic nature of the hype around generative ai or a prospective agi does not seem to have bothered many corporate clients, and why it has instead proven to be such an effective marketing tool. it is in many ways the same dream: a “highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.”100 as it turns out, sam altman didn’t even have to build his agi to ask it how it might generate revenue it was clear from the start. copyediting by caren litherland. design by partner & partners. graph by roberto rocha. cite as brian merchant, “ai generated business: the rise of agi and the rush to find a working revenue model”, ai now institute, december 2024. footnotes

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artificial intelligence supported by the tesla chief executive had claimed that the a.i. start up put profits and commercial interests ahead of benefiting humanity. by cade metz reporting from san francisco elon musk withdrew his lawsuit on tuesday against openai, the maker of the online chatbot chatgpt, a day before a state judge in san francisco was set to consider whether it should be dismissed. the suit, filed in february, had accused the artificial intelligence start up and two of its founders, sam altman and greg brockman, of breaching openai’s founding contract by prioritizing commercial interests over the public good. a multibillion dollar partnership that openai signed with microsoft, mr. musk’s suit claimed, represented an abandonment of the company’s pledge to carefully develop a.i. and make the technology publicly available. mr. musk had argued that the founding contract said that the organization should instead be focused on building artificial general intelligence, or a.g.i., a machine that can do anything the brain can do, for the benefit of humanity. openai, based in san francisco, had called for a dismissal days after mr. musk filed the suit. he could still refile the suit in california or another state. mr. musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and openai declined to comment. mr. musk helped found openai in 2015 along with mr. altman, mr. brockman and several young a.i. researchers. he saw the research lab as a response to a.i. work being done at the time by google. mr. musk believed google and its co founder, larry page, were not appropriately concerned with the risks that a.i. presented to humanity. mr. musk parted ways with openai after a power struggle in 2018. the company later become an a.i. technology leader, creating chatgpt, a chatbot that can generate text and answer questions in humanlike prose. mr. musk founded his own a.i. company last year called xai, while repeatedly claiming that openai was not focused enough on the dangers of the technology. he filed his lawsuit weeks after members of the openai board unexpectedly fired mr. altman, saying he could no longer be trusted with the company’s mission to build a.i. for the good of humanity. mr. altman was reinstated after five days of negotiations with the board, and soon cemented his control over the company, reclaiming a seat on the board. late last month, openai announced that it had started working on a new artificial intelligence model that would succeed the gpt 4 technology that drives chatgpt. the company said that it expected the new model to bring “the next level of capabilities” as it strove to build a.g.i. the company also said it was creating a new safety and security committee to explore how it should handle the risks posed by the new model and future technologies. cade metz writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology.