On December 11, 2015, Silicon Valley did what it does best, announced a new kind of company that was supposed to change the world.

Its backers included Sam Altman, a near legendary investor and president of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, and Elon Musk, who is, you know, Elon Musk.

The company was called OpenAI, and the idea, simply put, was to get artificial intelligence right.

It's something that both Altman and Musk talk about a lot. Here's Altman last year.

What does it mean to build something that is more capable than ourselves?

Like what does that say about our humanity? What's that world going to look like? What's our place

in that world? How is that going to be equitably shared? How do we make sure that it's not

like a handful of people in San Francisco making decisions and reaping all the benefits?

I think we have an opportunity that comes along only every couple of centuries

to redo the socioeconomic contract and how we include everybody in that and make everybody

a winner and how we don't destroy ourselves in the process is a huge question.

For Open AI, the answer to that question was, as the name suggests, openness.

They promised a kind of radical transparency.

Employees who were researching neural nets and machine learning were encouraged to publish their papers and their code.

And if company research led to patents, it would share them with the world and not keep them under lock and key.

This was the defining ethos of OpenAI.

And since that launch back in 2015, they've become a dominant player in the world of artificial intelligence.

I follow OpenAI's work and have been following their work because they are one of the top AI research labs in the world.

That's Karen Howe, senior AI reporter at MIT's Tech Review.

So it seemed like the time was ripe to actually start looking into the inside story of how they operate.

So you made arrangements to spend some time embedded in their office.

Tell me about that experience. So I reached out to

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