One Saturday last month, five men ages 19 through 26 strode confidently out of a cloud of magenta smoke in a converted auto showroom in San Francisco. They sat at a line of computer keyboards to loud cheers from a crowd of a few hundred. Ninety minutes of intense mouse-clicking later, the five’s smiles had turned sheepish and the applause consolatory. Team OG, champions at the world’s most lucrative videogame, Dota 2, had lost two consecutive games to a collective of artificial intelligence bots.

The result was notable because complex videogames are mathematically more challenging than cerebral-seeming board games like chess or Go. Yet leaning against a wall backstage, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the research institute that created the bots, was as relieved as he was celebratory.

“We were all pretty nervous this morning—I thought we had like a 60-40 chance,” said Altman, a compact figure in a white T-shirt and whiter, showy sneakers. He became OpenAI’s CEO in March after stepping down as president of influential startup incubator YCombinator and had reason to be measured about the day’s win. To succeed in his new job, Altman needs bots to do more than beat humans at videogames—he needs them to be better than people at everything.

OpenAI’s stated mission is to ensure that all of humanity benefits from any future AI that’s capable of outperforming “humans at most economically valuable work.” Such technology, dubbed artificial general intelligence, or AGI, does not seem close, but OpenAI says it and others are making progress. The organization has shown it can produce research on par with the best in the world. It has also been accused of hype and fearmongering by AI experts critical of its fixation on AGI and AI technology’s potential hazards.

Under Altman’s plans, OpenAI’s research—and provocations—would accelerate. Previously chair of the organization, he took over as CEO after helping flip most of the nonprofit’s staff into a new for-profit company, in hopes of tapping investors for the billions he claims he needs to shape the destiny of AI and humanity. Altman says the big tech labs at Alphabet and elsewhere need to be pressured by a peer not driven to maximize shareholder value. “I don’t want a world where a single tech company creates AGI and captures all of the value and makes all of the decisions,” he says.

At an MIT event in late 2014, Tesla CEO Elon Musk described AI research as like “summoning the demon.” In the summer of 2015, he got talking with Altman and a few others over dinner about creating a research lab independent of the tech industry to steer AI in a positive direction. OpenAI was announced late that year, with Altman and Musk as cochairs. Musk left the board early in 2018, citing potential conflicts with his other roles.

In its short life, OpenAI has established itself as a serious venue for AI research. Ilya Sutskever, a cofounder of the organization who left a plum position in Google’s AI group to lead its research, oversees a staff that includes fellow ex-Googlers and alumni of Facebook, Microsoft, and Intel. Their work on topics such as robotics and machine learning has appeared at top peer-reviewed conferences. The group has teamed up with Google parent Alphabet to research AI safety; beating Team OG in Dota 2 earned respect from experts in AI and gaming.

OpenAI’s metamorphosis into a for-profit corporation was driven by a feeling that keeping pace with giants such as Alphabet will require access to ever-growing computing resources. In 2015, OpenAI said it had $1 billion in committed funding from Altman, Musk, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, and Amazon. Altman now says a single billion won’t be enough. “The amount of money we needed to be successful in the mission is much more gigantic than I originally thought,” he says.