OpenAI is no ordinary startup. It was a nonprofit before Altman created a for-profit arm to bring on outside investment from Microsoft. It’s that funding that allowed the company to scale, building the massive large language model that ultimately became ChatGPT and the image model DALL-E… The idea behind OpenAI in the first place was a research organization aimed at protecting humanity from runaway AI. If safety concerns around artificial intelligence are at the heart of this boardroom drama, then directors essentially showed they don’t care that OpenAI is a financial and technological rocket ship.