Thinking Back to TI 2018, OpenAI Five, and How AI Changed So Fast
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The recent public arguments around OpenAI’s nonprofit roots, its later for-profit structure, and the long-running fallout between Elon Musk and Sam Altman brought back a very specific memory for me: watching the Dota 2 tournament livestream around TI 2018 and thinking, even then, that something unusual was happening. OpenAI started in 2015 as a nonprofit, later created a capped-profit arm in 2019, and the tension between mission, control, money, and scale has stayed attached to the company ever since. 12