Founded in 2015 as a nonprofit, rather than a for-profit company, OpenAI promised to develop AI “in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity.” With billions of dollars in investments from Microsoft, Japanese bank SoftBank, and chipmaker Nvidia, however, OpenAI faced increasing corporate pressure to separate its business operations from the nonprofit, which placed a cap on the profits that investors could receive, in order to attract further investments and to have the option to IPO.