Seven years ago, back when OpenAI was still a nonprofit and Sam Altman wasn’t yet a household name, the lab trained a 1.5 billion–parameter model it christened GPT-2. At the time, the team was struck with terror by their own creation. Concerned about its potential to generate “deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale”—which, in retrospect, seems pretty tame—OpenAI opted not to release it. Instead the company provided a less powerful model to researchers, shared a bunch of technical details, and nodded gravely to the industry’s growing ethical responsibilities. Dario Amodei, who at the time was still heading up research at OpenAI, was part of the team that made that decision, and explained the motivation to the tech community.