They didn't start the private company until the person who promised them $1B reneged. That person reneged because they tried to forcefully takeover and were rebuked.
They were running out of money and forced to raise funds in a very for-profit way or fold.
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Edit: Rate limited because the hivemind has decided that it's unacceptable to insult their leader
People keep acting like if it wasn't for OpenAI we'd be in some LLM utopia. The reality is some other big tech giant would reach the current SOTA first and we'd be in the same predicament except with a company with 1000x more machinery to do the things you're complaining about.
It's ridiculous the sense of entitlement some people must have to keep insisting that OpenAI should have crawled into a cave and died because some megalomaniac threw a tantrum.