OpenAI was founded in 2015 as an idealistic nonprofit. Its goal was to build artificial general intelligence or AGI — an AI that could do most jobs better than a human could.

In the years that followed, OpenAI’s pursuit of AGI led them to develop the viral chatbot ChatGPT. The company became one of the top AI labs in the world.

But to get there, OpenAI’s leaders would compromise nearly every one of their founding ideals. Over four episodes, we explore how a little-known startup built one of the world’s most viral tech products … and nearly tore itself apart in the process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices