In partnership with

Shanah Tovah,

Since its inception in 2015, OpenAI has been at the forefront of artificial intelligence, shaping the future of the industry with groundbreaking advancements and ambitious goals. But what began as a non-profit dedicated to ensuring AGI (artificial general intelligence) benefits all of humanity has now evolved into one of the most talked-about startups in the world because of its explosive growth to recent challenges involving leadership changes.

It took about 5 years to find early product market fit with the launch of GPT-3 in 2020, which was the first real consumer Ai that the world got to play with. Up till then it was mostly R&D with very technical product launches that I’m sure in their world was huge but to us mainstream consumers, nothing really to care about. But the rest is now history as we’ve opened Pandora’s box and I cant even imagine now how I did work without the assistance of Ai.

I also want to emphasize that Sam Altman’s leadership has been instrumental in OpenAI’s success. Regardless of public commentary, often sensationalized, Sam has done an incredible job and fully deserves whatever equity or rewards come his way in future funding rounds. The "Thanos" reference isn't meant to cast him as a villain, but rather as a misunderstood figure, much like the iconic character in the MCU—driven by a vision of what he believes is right, regardless of the challenges or criticisms along the way. (And yes, I proudly embrace my geek status.)

Did you know OpenAi started almost a decade ago!?

Its founding team included tech heavyweights like Elon Musk (CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, co-founder of PayPal and OpenAI), Sam Altman (former president of Y Combinator), Greg Brockman (Former CTO of Stripe), Ilya Sutskever (Former Google Brain researcher), John Schulman (Former Berkeley AI researcher), Wojciech Zaremba (Former NYU researcher), who collectively pledged “to create a research lab that would develop AGI while prioritizing ethical considerations.”

The organization was initially funded with $1 billion in commitments, led by Elon Musk and other top tech executives who aren’t happy about it now.

Funding Overview

OpenAI's funding has been essential to its growth and ability to push AI research forward. Here’s a breakdown of its key funding events:

• 2015: $1 billion in funding commitments from Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and other tech leaders at the time of founding.

• 2019: Transition to a capped-profit model with the formation of OpenAI LP, allowing external investment.

• 2020: $1 billion investment from Microsoft, establishing a deep partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

• 2023: Additional investment from Microsoft, rumored to be as much as $10 billion, solidifying the strategic partnership and expanding commercial applications of OpenAI’s models.

• 2024: Rumored $6.5B lead by Thrive VC (Kushner) at a $150B valuation.

Key Events and Product Launches

• 2015 - OpenAI is founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and others with a $1 billion funding commitment.

• 2016 - OpenAI releases its first major product, OpenAI Gym, a toolkit for reinforcement learning development.

• 2017 - OpenAI introduces OpenAI Baselines, providing high-quality implementations of reinforcement learning algorithms.

• 2018 - GPT-1, OpenAI’s first generative language model, is released, laying the groundwork for future advancements.

• 2019 - GPT-2, an advanced language model, is unveiled but initially withheld due to concerns about misuse.

• 2020 - GPT-3 is launched, becoming a major milestone in generative AI. OpenAI partners with Microsoft, securing a $1 billion investment. OpenAI Codex is introduced, which powers GitHub Copilot for code generation.

• 2021 - DALL-E, a model capable of generating images from text descriptions, is launched

Modern Day Bell Labs? Do you even know what that is…

Are you old enough to know what Bell Labs is? Both have driven major advances, but their missions, approaches, and impacts reflect the times in which they were founded. Below is a comparison of the two in terms of founding missions, key innovations, organizational structures, and lasting impacts both technologically and from the people that worked there over the decades.

OpenAi Controversies and Leadership Departures

Despite its successes, OpenAI has not been without controversy. In recent years, the organization has faced scrutiny over its commercialization, the ethical implications of powerful AI models, and the very nature of its transition from a non-profit to a now rumored for profit B Corp. One of the key points of contention has been whether OpenAI's rapid growth aligns with its original mission of making AGI safe and accessible to all.

Here’s a list of notable people who have left OpenAI in the past few years, their roles at the company, and what they are doing now:

• Andrej Karpathy (Co-founder, Research Scientist): Co-founded OpenAI, left in 2017 to lead Tesla’s Autopilot team, rejoined OpenAI in 2023, and left again in 2024. He is now working on Eureka Labs, an AI education startup​

• Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder, Chief Scientist): Co-ran OpenAI’s safety and alignment team. Left in 2024 to focus on Safe Superintelligence, a startup developing safe AGI. The company raised $1B because why not, being valued at $5 billion​.

• Jan Leike (Co-head of the Super Alignment Team): Left in 2024 due to disagreements about safety priorities at OpenAI. He has since joined Anthropic, OpenAi’s kind of biggest competitor

• John Schulman (Co-founder, Head of Alignment Science): Left OpenAI in 2024 and also joined Anthropic, expressing a desire to focus more on hands-on AI alignment work

• Mira Murati (Chief Technology Officer): Resigned last week after over six years at OpenAI. She has not announced her next steps but cited a “desire for personal exploration​” but most definitely will raise $1B for something soon.

• Peter Deng (Vice President of Consumer Product): Left OpenAI in mid-2024. He previously worked at Uber and Meta but has not yet disclosed his next venture​ thought will raise 100s of millions I’m sure.

What Does The Future Hold?

Assuming they’re raising $6.5B at a $150B valuation, while rumored to be doing $3.7B in revenue but with $5B in losses… with projected $11B in revenue for 2025 but how many billions in losses? We’re definitely back in the growth at all costs when it comes to Ai. For comparison Uber has a marketcap of $150B with $37B in revenue.

So next year, will they will try to IPO with almost 3x in revenue growth at like a $250B+ valuation? They will need to raise at least $10B-$20B eventually to get another 2-4yrs runway + debt etc to sustain their amazing growth and sizable losses.

1. What do you think of OpenAi and Sam Atlman? Would you invest in this round?

2. What’s your favorite Ai tool/platform?

3. Expert answers to your most important health questions www.roon.com

FIND ME: 𝕏 @Trace_Cohen / in LinkedIn

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