Greg, Sam and Elon made a company and literally went out and hired researchers like Ilya.
They pulled together funding, created a company, and hired a team of researchers to operate it. If that isnt founding a company, I dont know what is. Sam was there before all of them
It is not like a scrappy team of researchers with a pre-existing company went out, got funding, then gave the VCs board seats.
If you are going to copy and paste from wikipedia, read a little further:
>In December 2015, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research announced[15] the formation of OpenAI and pledged over $1 billion to the venture. The actual collected total amount of contributions was only $130 million until 2019.[6] According to an investigation led by TechCrunch, Musk was its largest donor while YC Research did not contribute anything at all.[16] The organization stated it would "freely collaborate" with other institutions and researchers by making its patents and research open to the public.[17][18] OpenAI is headquartered at the Pioneer Building in Mission District, San Francisco.[19][20]
According to Wired, Brockman met with Yoshua Bengio, one of the "founding fathers" of deep learning, and drew up a list of the "best researchers in the field".[21] Brockman was able to hire nine of them as the first employees in December 2015.
Also good reading: https://web.archive.org/web/20160427162700/http://www.wired....