The 5 Internal Decks Where OpenAI Planned AGI

5 internal OpenAI decks (2017–2020) that show how AGI was planned years before the breakthrough

OpenAI was built with a clear purpose: “Build safe AGI”.

Since 2017, the company has experienced growth like nothing before, changing the world and with one breakthrough after another one.

Revenue followed the same curve growing 3X year over year, or 10X from 2023 to 2025: $2B ARR in 2023, $6B in 2024, and $20B+ in 2025.

This is never-before-seen growth at such scale.

In today’s newsletter, we curated something indedited:

From 2017 to 2020, the decks internal decks of OpenAI

• 2017
  AI is fragile and dangerous by default. Alignment is the bottleneck.

• Early 2018
  Reinforcement learning and scale start to work in complex environments.

• September 2018
  OpenAI locks its mission: build safe AGI and distribute the benefits.

• 2019
  Systems outperform humans in games and simulated worlds.

• 2020
  Large generative models + large-scale RL unlock general capability.

These decks show:

• How AI thinking shifted from narrow tasks to general systems

• Why scale became inevitable, not optional

• When language models stopped being experiments and became foundations

• Why safety, alignment, and deployment were treated as first-order problems

• How OpenAI’s scope expanded from a small research lab to a platform shaping an entire industry

This growth wasn’t accidental. It tracks almost perfectly with the ideas in the decks: the shift to scale, the focus on general systems, the bet on language models, and the long-term AGI mission locked in years earlier.

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Here you go, enjoy 🔥

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