Greg Brockman talks about when OpenAI first realized that AGI can't be achieved with "Non-Profit" status and the decided to abandon its Non-Profit roots.

"In 2017, we started to think very hard about, first of all, how do we really achieve the mission? How do we actually build an AGI? What will that look like?

And we started to do the math on compute. You start to realize that it is going to take a big computer. We came across a company called Cerebras, which was building a unique piece of computing hardware. The kind of computer that they were promising, we realized, was going to be far advanced from where our compute calculations looked.

As you start to realize, if we could buy a lot of those computers, we could actually probably succeed at building an AGI. If we could get exclusive access to Cerebras, that could give us an overwhelming advantage. If we could buy very large data centers, that could be something unique as well.

The thing about nonprofit fundraising is that I think there is essentially a cap to what is possible there. And so Elon, Sam, Ilya, and I all agreed that the only path forward for OpenAI, and the only path to achieve the mission, was to create a for-profit entity associated with OpenAI in some form.

And so, we were committed to that direction. That is something that we knew was the only way to achieve the mission."

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From "The Knowledge Project Podcast" YT Channel (link in comment)