By Mike Pearl
Publication Date: 2026-01-21 10:30:00
Way back in March of 2019, this weird thing happened where a relatively insignificant tech nonprofit called OpenAI became a “capped” for-profit company—whatever that is. The month earlier, OpenAI had announced the creation of an uncanny, über-powerful language model called GPT-2 that was supposedly just too dangerous to release. Then in November, OpenAI seemingly changed its mind and GPT-2 was released after all.
OpenAI said in the blog post about the release that it saw, “no strong evidence of misuse so far,” but added that it was impossible to “be aware of all threats.” Most people never used GPT-2, because OpenAI never injected it into a viral chatbot.
As someone who wrote about this at the time, it was puzzling to watch it all play out. OpenAI seemed like small potatoes, but it was also building creepy AI tech, and shifting in public image from being a do-gooder computer lab advertising its trepidation about harming a hair on anyone’s head to…
