Last week [2015-12-11], investors including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Jessica Livingston announced the founding of OpenAI, a nonprofit research venture aimed at developing “digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity.” While it’s not entirely clear what OpenAI will do, the investors said they plan to pump as much as $1.3^$1₂₀₁₅ billion into AI research over time, with all of the results—including research, code, and patents—made public and royalty-free. By doing their work in the open, they hope to counteract the influence of governments and private companies trying to earn money and power from AI’s superhuman potential.

Musk, the C.E.O. of Tesla and SpaceX, and Altman, the C.E.O. of early-stage start-up accelerator Y Combinator, will co-chair OpenAI. Altman spoke with VF.com following the announcement about his fears going into the project, how he’ll find the time, and how he first met Musk.

Vanity Fair: How did this all come to be?
Sam Altman: We have been talking about AI for a long, long time—a year, two years. This specific structure and this idea of a nonprofit that works this way is newer. This specific configuration, the early shape took place over the summer, and then very early fall, we really started getting into it.

V Fair: How did you settle on this as the specific structure?
S Altman: We just talked about every specific structure and thought this one [a 501(c)3 nonprofit] had the most advantages. The big one is that we’re extremely flexible and unconstrained and entirely focused on the optimal path. It’s not like we have a duty to shareholders. We’re a true nonprofit and we can operate only on what we view is optimal.
V F: Why not try to make a profit?
S A: I think that the misaligned incentives there would be suboptimal to the world as a whole. I have plenty of other things to make money. I have Elon as sort of the other counter. It’s fine to do this one to help out.

V: …How has it been working with Elon?
A: Good. I really trust him, which is obviously important to everyone involved. We’ll have to figure out a way to spend more time on it than we currently have free. This is the second day of this.

V: What is causing you the most stress now?
A: This is a fairly new kind of organization. I have a lot of experience with for-profit start-ups. I have very little with nonprofits, so I’m just not sure how it’s going to go.

The concern I know about I’m not worried about. It’s the concerns I don’t yet know about that worry me most. What I always look at, any organization is defined by the quality of its people. My belief is that we got that right.

V: You’ve started with a pretty impressive team. How many people do you think you’ll hire?
A: I don’t think we want a thousand-person organization, ever. I don’t think you actually need that to solve this problem. I think a smaller group that has the most powerful people in the world that’s aligned and focused is the way to go here. It will certainly get much bigger than it is now.

[The OA for-profit was ~800 on-the-books employees by late 2023 (and many more contractors, data labelers, volunteers, spinoffs, etc).]