Sam Altman addresses that when he was asked that question in 'How I Built This' Podcast. Essentially: OpenAI did not realize the massive scale they needed for

Sam Altman addresses that when he was asked that question in 'How I Built This' Podcast. Essentially: OpenAI did not realize the massive scale they needed for them to be successful. When they realized this, they could not raise any funding as 'non-profit'. They asked govt, who did not want to fund it, and other sources, at the end they did not have any other recourse. Sam Altaman says: 90% of funding was needed for compute power, but also was needed for things like buying dataset and then to pay employee so that they can compete with likes of Google to retain them. If they would not have done this, then very soon they would have become irreverent. So to retain the earlier intent (for greater good) they put in bunch of 'safety features' around funding - Ex. 'Profit Cap' - investors would get only certain amount of profit and after that the profit would be distributed to the world (in some way). Similarly, there were few other 'safety feature he talked about. The relevant portion starts at 32:39 mark in the following podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3oOX1QHLPw9uvLL5LmBk28?si=sEhqhTriTCSCgMbuyeUgnQ https://open.spotify.com/episode/3oOX1QHLPw9uvLL5LmBk28?si=s...