Please stay tuned for important disclosure information at the conclusion of this episode.

Welcome to Investing Insights. I'm your host, Ivana Hampton. The Age of AI appears to have arrived.

OpenAI's popular chatbot is answering questions from millions of people, and Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in the startup.

The tech titan has also taken an early lead in the AI race, but others are also benefiting from the craze.

Morningstar Research Services, Senior Equity Research Analyst Dan Rom Romanov, has written a report on Microsoft's

AI bet, and Dan is joining the podcast. Dan, let's kick off this conversation with Open AI's

origin story. Talk about the founders, their original mission and where they are today.

Yeah, great. So 2015 or thereabouts, you had a group of sort of tech visionaries and luminaries and sort of academics and like accomplished professionals and AI. And those names include Sam Altman, who's, you know, one of the co-founders. He's the CEO now, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel. Greg Brockman is sort of one of the AI minds that was behind all this.

And then there was just like a long list of who's who kind of investors you had like AWS was

involved, InfoS was involved. So there were sort of like large corporate VC entities. And that's kind of the,

you know, the names of it. And the initial mission was to sort

of make AI friendly and make AI sort of benefit all of humanity. And that was something that they

stressed sort of repeatedly over and over for a few years. So that was sort of the foundational,

you know, elements of it and some of the people

involved. And it's supposed to be a nonprofit. And I think that's also an important point in the

story, not that it matters so much, but eventually you had Microsoft come in and invested a billion

dollars initially a few years ago. And then recently it's believed to be 10 billion dollars so

I mean big numbers are being thrown around and at some point they changed it to a for-profit

like a capped for-profit so Microsoft can earn a return on it but it's sort of limited to to a hundred

times their initial investment so there's plenty of upside for Microsoft.

But so, you know, it's not a not profit anymore.

So, like, that has evolved.

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