OpenAI is founded
A group of founders announced a non-profit laboratory with a billion-dollar commitment and the goal of developing AI to benefit all of humanity.
Why it matters
Frontier research first got an organisation that declared safety and openness as its charter rather than as a side condition.
The declared structure was non-profit with open publication of results. Both conditions later changed: a capped-profit structure and a Microsoft agreement arrived in 2019, and publication became selective. That gap between the declared and the actual became a subject of dispute in the field. What matters here is different: a player appeared whose bet on scale defined the next decade. The announcement names the roster, and it is worth holding in the data: eleven years later that roster became the subject of a lawsuit. The co-chairs are Sam Altman and Elon Musk. The research director is Ilya Sutskever and the CTO is Greg Brockman, formerly CTO of Stripe. The founding members are Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata and Wojciech Zaremba. The funders are Altman, Brockman, Musk, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services, Infosys and YC Research, committing a billion dollars in total, with the caveat that only a small fraction was expected to be spent in the following years.