We view this mission as the most important challenge of our time. It requires simultaneously advancing AI’s capability, safety, and positive impact in the world. In this post, we share the history of our current structure, why we think a change is necessary, and what specific change we are considering.

We began in 2015 as a research lab with a vision that AGI might really happen, and we wanted to help it go as well as possible. In these early days, we thought that progress relied on key ideas produced by top researchers and that supercomputing clusters were less important.

We performed experiments ranging from toolkits for game-playing AI to robotics research and published papers. We had no products, no business, and no commercial revenue.

Our stated goal was “advancing digital intelligence in the way most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” A non-profit structure seemed fitting, and we raised donations in various forms including cash ($137M, less than a third of which was from Elon) and compute credits and discounts ($1.8M from Amazon and $50M or more from each of Azure and Google Cloud).