You might think, based on the type of research they're doing, that the OpenAI office would be full of gadgets, full of wonder, full of weird experiments.

But you'd be wrong.

There are no Faraday cages. No supercomputers. No giant robots.

Well, okay, there is a robot. But it's small. And it's tucked away in a side room. It's surrounded by cobbled-together protective material so that it doesn't smash into itself if it starts flailing about due to a programming error. As Jack Clark, OpenAI's strategy and communications director, phrases it: "This room is much more tool-sheddy and hacky than you'd expect AI to feel like."

Jack Clark

OpenAI is basically just a lot of desks, laptops, and bean bag chairs. On its surface—minus the robot—it feels like any other tech startup.

And it functions like one, too.

"We do our weekly meetings on Tuesday," Clark says, standing in front of an open area with a few dozen chairs haphazardly strewn about. There's a whiteboard in the corner and a large TV at the front. In these meetings, people stand up and update everyone on their work, whether it's a research breakthrough or details on a new piece of software from engineering.

This space is also used for a daily reading group.

"We have such a broad spread of expertise here—the people who work on robots, the generative adversarial people—all of them come together to soak up different ideas," Clark says.

When you hear about the work people are doing here, you realize there are incredible things happening in this place. Things that have the potential to change the way we use and think about technology, the way the world conducts itself day to day, and the way we think about the nature of intelligence beyond humans.

But before going any farther, you need to know about a dinner that happened in August 2015.