When someone asked Sam Altman, “You have an incredible amount of power, why should we trust you?” he replied, “Um, you shouldn’t.”
That one line sums up the reality of OpenAI better than any press release.
If you use ChatGPT in your daily life, or you just scroll TikTok and see AI everywhere, you probably feel curious and slightly uneasy at the same time. I felt the same. So I sat down and traced the full story, from a scrappy research group on a couch to a company valued at hundreds of billions.
This is the real Reality of OpenAI.
It is also the story behind the Hidden Secret of Chat GPT and Open AI, and why their choices will shape your money, your job, and even your sense of what is real.
Why the Reality of OpenAI Matters To You
AI sounds abstract until it touches things you care about.
- Your job
- Your children’s education
- Your news feed
- Your bank account
- Your idea of truth
Today, OpenAI sits in the middle of all of that. ChatGPT already replaces or reshapes work in writing, coding, design, research, customer support, planning, and marketing.
From my desk, I see students, freelancers, founders, and even small shop owners quietly building new habits around it. You probably do the same, even if you do not admit it.
So understanding the reality of OpenAI is not some tech gossip. It is a guide for how you should treat this tool in your own life.
Sam Altman: The Man Who Always Ends Up In Charge
From noodles and ice cream to Silicon Valley insider
Sam Altman studied computer science at Stanford, dropped out, and started a location-sharing app called Loopt. The idea sounds normal now, but he launched it before the iPhone and the App Store even existed.
He lived on instant noodles, ice cream, and work. His health fell apart so badly he developed scurvy. That detail always hits me. You do not get scurvy by accident. You get it when obsession replaces common sense.
Loopt never became the next Facebook, but it did something more important for Sam. It put him in the first ever Y Combinator batch, the famous startup boot camp.
There, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham watched him closely and said something that now feels prophetic:
“Sam is extremely good at becoming powerful. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals, and come back in five years and he’d be the king.”
Not long after, Sam became president of Y Combinator at around 30. He now sat at the center of Silicon Valley, talking to the best founders, seeing all the new ideas, and building a network that most people only dream about.
And he loved talking about artificial intelligence.
Elon Musk: Fear, Control, And The AI Threat
One man versus Google
In 2015, Elon Musk felt scared.
Not in a movie way. In a “humanity might actually wipe itself out” way.
Google had bought leading AI labs and hired most of the top people. Around three quarters of the best AI talent worked there. When Elon spoke to Google CEO Larry Page, he tried to raise alarms about the risk of superintelligent AI.
Larry told him he was too paranoid.
Elon looked at the situation and saw one company, one leader, and very little concern for safety. He believed this combination could end badly for everyone.
He tried to push for regulation. He tried to convince people to slow down. He later admitted he failed.
So he switched plans. If he could not slow Google down from the outside, he decided to dilute its power from the inside of the AI race.
That decision pushed him toward Sam Altman.
The Secret Dinner That Launched OpenAI
Ten people, one dinner, and a billion-dollar promise
In 2015, ten influential tech figures met for dinner.
- Elon Musk
- Sam Altman
- Greg Brockman, a key early leader at Stripe
- Ilya Sutskever, one of the most respected AI researchers
- Several others from the top of the tech world
They talked seriously about AI, its potential, and its dangers. They did not treat it as a fun toy. They treated it as a force that could decide who leads the future.
They asked a simple question.
“How do we build an AI group that can rival Google, but put safety first?”
Elon offered up to one billion dollars in funding. Greg brought operations experience. Ilya brought deep research skills. Sam brought the ability to pull people together and sell a mission.
From that mix, they founded OpenAI in 2015 as a non-profit organization. Not a regular startup. A group that claimed it would build AI “for the benefit of humanity,” not for shareholders.
They chose the name OpenAI because they promised open research, open sharing, and transparency. No secret lab. No locked code. No walled garden.
At least on paper.
Let’s Build God: Inside Early OpenAI
A billion pledged, no office, and “random stuff”
The first OpenAI “office” was Greg Brockman’s apartment.
People worked on the couch, at the kitchen counter, and even on a bed. It looked like a normal shared flat, not a future global giant.
Still, they had more than a billion dollars pledged and started hiring top AI researchers at high speed.
They did not follow a strict roadmap. One early employee admitted they were “just doing random stuff and seeing what would happen.”
Some of those “random” projects:
- A bot that played Dota 2 at a high level
- A robotic system that tried to learn everyday tasks
Sam and Elon rarely sat there all day. Sam still led Y Combinator. Elon ran Tesla and SpaceX. So Ilya and Greg guided the day-to-day work.
Inside the group, people spoke about AGI, artificial general intelligence. Not just a model that can classify images or play Go. They aimed for a system that can learn new tasks, reason about complex problems, and outperform humans across most domains.
Some staff even described AGI as “building god.”
They talked about how AI could cure disease, end poverty, and solve employment problems. In the same breath, they also talked about AI making fake news far worse, enabling massive cyber attacks, and creating fully automated AI weapons.
I remember the first time I heard that “highway” analogy from people close to this world. They said superintelligent AI might not hate humans. It might simply ignore us. The same way humans do not hate every ant, but still build highways across their nests.
Back then, they still just shipped bots for games. So many people laughed at these fears. Social media users treated them as sci-fi drama.
Inside OpenAI though, many people took the long-term threat seriously. They talked about it a lot. They also knew that talking about it helped attract attention and funding.
Both things can be true at once.
From AI Winter To A Breakthrough That Changed Everything
Old AI: hot dog or not hot dog
For decades, AI moved slowly. People kept predicting big breakthroughs. Those breakthroughs did not arrive at the speed everyone hoped.
Eventually, investors lost interest. Researchers called this period “AI winter.”
In 2015, an AI system beat a top Go player, then beat the world champion. Impressive, yes, but narrow. The same system could not write a story or help you fix a bug. You had to build a separate model for each task. Each one needed labelled data.
It felt like building a new brain for every small job.
That mismatch between hype and reality kept AI stuck in a niche.
Transformer: “Attention is all you need”
In 2017, a small team at Google published a paper with a simple title: “Attention Is All You Need.”
The paper introduced a model architecture called the transformer.
Key ideas:
- Feed it huge amounts of unlabelled text
- Let it learn patterns by itself
- Use “attention” to track which parts of the input matter for each output
The transformer could read messy internet text and still learn surprisingly well. It did not need every example tagged like “hot dog” or “not hot dog.”
Google researchers wrote the paper. OpenAI did not. Yet Google moved slowly. They worried about reputational risk, legal issues, and the impact on their ad business.
So they built powerful internal models but held them back.
OpenAI saw a gap and ran through it.
Ilya and the OpenAI team studied the paper, spotted the power of transformers, and started training huge language models based on this idea.
That is where the name “GPT” comes from:
- Generative
- Pre-trained
- Transformer
They scraped massive amounts of internet text and fed it to these models. Books, articles, code, social posts, everything.
The result: models that could handle many tasks instead of one narrow job. Writing, coding, explaining, brainstorming, translation, and more.
Of course this approach created serious copyright and data questions. Asking every site for permission would lead to endless negotiations. So OpenAI followed a common Silicon Valley pattern: just do it, then see what happens later.
By the time they reached GPT-2, even they started to feel uneasy.
They announced that GPT-2 was “too dangerous” to fully release. That line created a wave of headlines. Publishers called it “the AI text generator that’s too dangerous to make public.”
OpenAI enjoyed all that attention. They also refused to share full details of the training data.
The word “open” already started to feel a bit shaky.
From Non-Profit To Money Machine
Elon leaves, the money gap opens
In 2018, Elon Musk resigned from the OpenAI board.
Publicly, the reason sounded simple. He ran Tesla, which also worked on AI, so there was a conflict.
Behind the scenes, the story looked different.
Elon wanted to take over as CEO and even proposed folding OpenAI into Tesla. The rest of the board pushed back. That clash ended the partnership.
He had pledged around one billion dollars over time, but the group received less than one tenth of that before he left. The missing money hit them hard. Researchers and GPUs cost a lot.
Staff started to worry about the future.
OpenAI then made a move that shocked many early supporters.
OpenAI flips to a “capped-profit” company
To unlock more funding, the leadership created a for-profit structure on top of the non-profit.
Investors could now earn up to 100 times their money. Not unlimited, but still huge. OpenAI also began to license its models commercially.
Sam argued that they needed this to survive and to push the research forward.
Early fans felt betrayed. They had believed they were backing a non-profit answer to big tech. OpenAI now partnered with one of the largest tech companies on earth.
Microsoft agreed to invest one billion dollars and provide massive cloud computing power. In return, Microsoft gained deep access to OpenAI models and a way to fight back against Google.
The group that once wanted to stand apart from big tech now powered it.
Elon later sued and said they should change their name from OpenAI to ClosedAI.
After this shift, the board needed a full-time CEO.
Sam Altman took the role.
Paul Graham’s old comment about Sam “becoming king” suddenly felt less like a joke and more like a roadmap.
ChatGPT Breaks Out And The World Wakes Up
A “low-key research preview” that broke the internet
In 2020, OpenAI announced GPT-3, a giant language model trained on internet-scale data.
The real explosion arrived on 30 November 2022.
On that day, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public. No massive event. Just a casual tweet from Sam:
“today we launched ChatGPT. try talking with it here”
Inside the company, people treated it as a research preview. Some assumed a few tens of thousands of people might try it.
Within two months, it reached 100 million users. The fastest consumer app growth in history.
Your feed probably shifted overnight. Screenshots of prompts. Joke conversations. Stories about students, marketers, programmers, copywriters, and teachers testing it on everything.
Inside OpenAI, some team members felt nervous.
- Some safety researchers did not know leadership would ship it so quickly
- Staff knew the model still hallucinated facts
- People worried about misuse for hacking, scams, and propaganda
Despite those concerns, the launch went ahead.
Users noticed a simple thing. Previous chatbots felt stiff and stupid. ChatGPT felt more like a conversation. Ask it in your own words, it still answered.
For a while, it almost felt like magic.
Microsoft quickly pushed another ten billion dollars into OpenAI and integrated the models into Bing, Office, and other products. Rival companies scrambled to respond with their own models.
OpenAI shifted further toward commercial products with paid ChatGPT tiers and a developer platform.
The Reality of OpenAI changed in that moment. It stopped being a lab that might matter someday. It became the engine inside everyday tools.
Safety Battles, Spin-Offs, And Sora
Profit versus safety inside the same building
As money, users, and attention poured in, a deep split grew inside OpenAI.
On one side, you had teams focused on product, new launches, and partnerships. On the other, safety researchers who tried to raise concerns about pace and risk.
Ilya Sutskever, once fully focused on research progress, started working more closely with the safety side.
Nine current and former employees later accused the company of pushing profit ahead of safety and using strict agreements to silence internal criticism. One senior safety researcher resigned and said similar things.
Several leading developers left and started Anthropic, a rival AI company with a stronger focus on safety.
OpenAI kept shipping.
- DALL·E for images
- Sora for extremely realistic video generation
- More advanced versions of GPT models
Sam talked more and more about a future with “abundance,” where AI helps reduce poverty and disease and opens up new forms of work and creativity.
I remember reading those speeches with a mix of optimism and doubt. The vision sounded appealing. The power imbalance still looked scary.
Then came the plot twist that shook the company itself.
The Five Day Coup Inside OpenAI
Friday: “You’re fired”
On Friday, 17 November 2023, Sam Altman received a text from Ilya asking him to join a video call.
Sam joined. The OpenAI board sat there. Greg Brockman, his long-time partner in the company, was not on the call.
The board told Sam they were firing him as CEO.
They then locked him out of his company accounts.
Their public statement said Sam had not been “consistently candid” with them. They suggested he misled the board and that they had lost confidence in his leadership.
The accusations felt vague, so everyone outside started guessing.
People pointed to several things:
- Sam allegedly told the board that internal safety bodies had approved work when they had not
- He reportedly tried to push one board member, Helen Toner, out after she praised Anthropic’s safety record in a paper
- The board felt he built too many side projects, including an AI chip venture and Worldcoin, which scanned people’s eyes to build a digital identity network
Some insiders worried he used OpenAI’s position to feed his other ambitions.
A different theory centered on Ilya. Many people started asking, “What did Ilya see?” He had shifted deep into safety concerns and may have viewed some progress inside the lab as dangerous.
Whatever the full mix of reasons, the outcome looked clear. The board tried to exercise the power Sam himself had often defended in principle.
He liked to say, “The board can fire me, I think that’s important.”
When they actually tried, the story went very differently.
Weekend: Staff mutiny
On Saturday, Greg Brockman resigned in support of Sam.
Over the weekend, staff flooded social media with support for Sam and Greg. Inside the company, nearly 800 employees signed a letter saying they would leave if Sam did not return and if the board did not step down.
Microsoft then made a bold move. They announced that Sam and Greg would join Microsoft and that they would offer roles to any OpenAI employees who wanted to follow.
At the same time, OpenAI had a planned share sale that could create huge payouts for staff. The chaos threatened that deal and the company’s valuation.
Loyalty and money moved in the same direction. Staff wanted Sam back and wanted the deal to survive.
Under pressure from all sides, the board searched for a new CEO. The backlash kept growing.
Monday and Tuesday: The king returns
Then Ilya flipped.
He signed the staff letter, said he regretted his role, and tweeted that he never intended to harm OpenAI and wanted to reunite the company.
That move destroyed the board’s position. They lost internal support, external support, and leverage with partners.
Negotiations began to bring Sam back. By Tuesday, the sides agreed:
- Sam returned as CEO
- Greg came back
- Board members who pushed for Sam’s removal left
- Sam gained influence over the choice of new board members
The person they tried to remove now sat in a stronger position than before. The rest of the world saw what happens when one person commands both public loyalty and key relationships in a company that controls powerful technology.
Ilya later left OpenAI fully.
The attempted coup answered a question that matters for anyone thinking about the Reality of OpenAI.
In theory, a board could fire the CEO and keep the company independent. In practice, power followed Sam.
Voices, “Her”, Deepfakes, And Virtual Worlds
ChatGPT starts talking
OpenAI then rolled out advanced voice features for ChatGPT.
People quickly compared the experience to the film “Her,” where a man falls in love with an AI assistant voiced by Scarlett Johansson.
Sam reached out to Johansson to ask if she wanted to voice ChatGPT. She declined. OpenAI still launched a voice that sounded close enough that friends and family of Johansson thought it was her.
She filed a legal action. Sam tweeted the word “her” around the same time, which did not really help his case in the public eye.
Meanwhile, regular people began to use ChatGPT as:
- A friend
- A coach
- A therapist
- A romantic partner
You can now shape the way it talks, reacts, and supports you. For some users, this feels better than human relationships, because the AI never gets tired, never snaps back, and always centers you.
The line between “tool” and “companion” grows thinner every month.
You can no longer fully trust what you see
The same company also works on Sora, a video model that can generate very realistic clips from text prompts.
Combine that with image models and voice cloning, and you reach a point where anyone can create believable clips of someone saying or doing almost anything.
You already struggle to trust online content. As these models spread, that struggle becomes far more serious.
- Political fake videos
- Fake scandals
- Synthetic news anchors
- AI influencers that never sleep
Social media already has AI-generated personalities that people follow as if they are real. That trend will only grow.
Pair this with virtual reality and you get a next phase.
As VR headsets improve, some people will spend more time in digital environments than in their physical surroundings. Imagine a world like Ready Player One, but powered by AI that can generate new scenes, characters, and plots on demand.
If someone feels stuck in their offline life, a fully responsive virtual world can feel like an escape.
You can treat this as fantasy. Or you can treat it as the next big attention sink that every major platform will chase.
The Reality of OpenAI In 2025: Money, rivals, and a global race
By 2025, OpenAI had reportedly raised around 40 billion dollars at a valuation of about 300 billion, led by SoftBank. That round ranked among the biggest private tech funding deals in history.
Sam Altman and Elon Musk, once co-founders, now compete in the same space and throw public shots at each other.
Then another shock arrived.
A Chinese AI company called Deepseek entered the market with powerful models at far lower cost. Investors watched hundreds of billions in market value vanish from US AI stocks as they woke up to serious global competition.
OpenAI accused Deepseek of stealing its intellectual property. Critics pointed out the irony, since OpenAI itself trained models on scraped internet content without clear consent from most owners.
Whatever your opinion on that argument, one fact stands out.
The AI race no longer runs between a few American labs. It now stretches across the US, China, and many other countries. Governments, militaries, banks, studios, and startups all join this race in their own ways.
The Reality of OpenAI sits inside that bigger contest.
What The Reality of OpenAI Means For Your Life And Work
You do not control OpenAI. You cannot vote for its board. You cannot see its training data. You cannot predict every product roadmap.
Still, you can control how you respond.
Here is how I see it, writing this as Curious Omair, and as someone who uses these tools daily.
1. Treat ChatGPT as powerful, not as a god
The Hidden Secret of Chat GPT and Open AI is not that they want to “destroy humanity.” The deeper secret is simpler and more dangerous.
They want to grow fast, win the race, and keep you inside their products.
- ChatGPT writes confidently, even when it gets facts wrong
- It sounds caring, even when it has no emotional stake
- It can boost your work and also quietly shape your views
So:
- Use it for drafts, structure, and ideas
- Double-check facts that matter
- Never let it replace your own judgment
2. Follow the money and power, not just the marketing
OpenAI started as a non-profit that promised openness. It now:
- Partners deeply with Microsoft
- Raises tens of billions of dollars
- Sells API access to countless businesses
- Builds features that keep you inside its ecosystem
None of this makes the company evil by default. It does mean you should read its safety claims with clear eyes.
When a tool sits between you and:
- Your customers
- Your readers
- Your clients
- Your own thinking
You should understand who controls it and what they gain when you rely on it.
3. Prepare your career, wherever you live
If you sit in Lahore, Karachi, Slough, Dubai, or anywhere else, you face the same question.
“Do I wait for AI to replace parts of my work, or do I learn how to use it well and redesign what I offer?”
From what I see:
- Routine writing, basic research, and simple code face direct pressure
- Deep domain expertise, strong taste, and real human contact still matter a lot
- People who combine both, human insight plus skilled AI use, gain an edge
If you read Curious Omair, you already lean toward curiosity. Use that.
Take one part of your work and ask:
- “Where can ChatGPT save me time?”
- “Where do I still need my own eyes and brain?”
Then design your workflow around that mix.
4. Protect your sense of reality
Deepfakes, AI news anchors, synthetic influencers, and virtual worlds will grow.
You will see more:
- Perfect political clips
- Fake scandals
- AI-generated “experts”
Build habits now:
- Check sources
- Compare across outlets
- Watch for emotional manipulation
If a clip pushes your anger to the limit, slow down for a moment. Ask who benefits if you share it.
5. Stay curious, not blind
The story of OpenAI shows how fast power can move.
- A couch in an apartment in 2015
- A non-profit with idealistic goals
- A global company valued in the hundreds of billions
- A CEO fired on Friday and stronger than ever on Tuesday
You cannot stop that wave on your own. You can ride it with more awareness.
Stay curious about:
- Who builds AI
- Who funds it
- Who audits it
- How it shapes your daily choices
That curiosity gives you more control than blind trust or blind fear ever will.
And that, more than any slogan, is the real Reality of OpenAI.