section_path: History/2015: founding and initial motivations
section_name: 2015: founding and initial motivations
paragraph_text: 2015: founding and initial motivations
  
  In December 2015, OpenAI was founded by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk as the co-chairs. A total of $1 billion in capital was pledged by Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research. The actual collected total amount of contributions was only $130 million until 2019. According to an investigation led by TechCrunch, while YC Research never contributed any funds, Open Philanthropy contributed $30 million and another $15 million in verifiable donations were traced back to Musk. OpenAI later stated that Musk's contributions totaled less than $45 million. The organization stated it would "freely collaborate" with other institutions and researchers by making its patents and research open to the public. OpenAI was initially run from Brockman's living room. It was later headquartered at the Pioneer Building in the Mission District, San Francisco.
  
  According to OpenAI's charter, its founding mission is "to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity."
  
  Musk and Altman stated in 2015 that they were partly motivated by concerns about AI safety and existential risk from artificial general intelligence. OpenAI stated that "it's hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society", and that it is equally difficult to comprehend "how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly". The startup also wrote that AI "should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible", and that "because of AI's surprising history, it's hard to predict when human-level AI might come within reach. When it does, it'll be important to have a leading research institution which can prioritize a good outcome for all over its own self-interest." Co-chair Sam Altman expected a decades-long project that eventually surpasses human intelligence.
  
  Vishal Sikka, former CEO of Infosys, stated that an "openness", where the endeavor would "produce results generally in the greater interest of humanity", was a fundamental requirement for his support; and that OpenAI "aligns very nicely with our long-held values" and their "endeavor to do purposeful work". Cade Metz of Wired suggested that corporations such as Amazon might be motivated by a desire to use open-source software and data to level the playing field against corporations such as Google and Facebook, which own enormous supplies of proprietary data. Altman stated that Y Combinator companies would share their data with OpenAI.