#OpenAI

The sequel to P16 — Sam Altman's return to OpenAI after the November 2023 board crisis and the year that followed. The year of GPT-4o, the for-profit conversion, the $157 billion valuation, the Sutskever departure, the AGI rhetoric escalation, the Apple partnership, and the deeper question of what the year revealed about OpenAI's mission and Altman's position in the AI industry.

The story of the companies, the investors, the research programmes, and the competitive dynamics that defined the AI industry from 2015 to 2025 — the people who believed they were building the most transformative and most dangerous technology in human history, and how that belief shaped what they built. The race to AGI, told from the inside.

The full story of the ChatGPT launch — the five days to a million users, the hundred million users in two months, the panic in schools and universities, the excitement in offices, the existential dread in newsrooms, and what it meant that AI had crossed the threshold from specialised tool to mainstream reality. The moment AI became everyone's business.

The full story of the twelve months from March 2023 to March 2024 — the deployment of GPT-4, the multimodal revolution, the competitive response from Google and Anthropic, the new capabilities that seemed to emerge at scale, and the extraordinary pace at which AI went from impressive to indispensable for millions of people. The year that made AI real.

The full story of OpenAI — the founding mission, the commercial pivot, the release of ChatGPT, the board crisis of 2023, and what it means that the organisation most explicitly committed to humanity's benefit has become the world's most commercially successful AI company. The most consequential organisation in the history of artificial intelligence, and the complicated man who leads it.

The co-founder of OpenAI, the architect of GPT, the chief scientist who voted to fire Sam Altman and then reversed course, and the founder of Safe Superintelligence Inc. The most technically gifted and most philosophically serious of the deep learning generation's leaders — and the figure whose trajectory tracks the field's own ambivalence about what it is building.