Why do so many of the world’s most famous companies come from the same university? Walk Around This Campus and You’ll See Something Strange Imagine walking through Stanford University on a sunny California afternoon. You pass a building where two PhD students once argued late into the night about the best way to organize the entire internet — they went on to create Google. A few minutes later, you walk past a dorm room where a college kid sketched out an app that would let photos disappear after ten seconds — that became Snapchat. Down the road, there’s a spot where four students got tired of not being able to order food delivery, so they built an app and started driving the meals themselves — that became DoorDash. ...

From a chatbot that types to an AI that can see, hear, and talk — OpenAI is building the future, one invention at a time. And the biggest question isn’t what AI can do. It’s what YOU will do with it. AI That Can See and Hear For most of history, talking to a computer meant typing on a keyboard. But OpenAI imagined something different: what if you could just talk to AI, like talking to a friend? ...

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released a chatbot that anyone could talk to. Five days later, one million people were using it. The world would never be the same. The Launch That Broke the Internet Nobody at OpenAI expected what happened next. On November 30, 2022, the company quietly released a free tool called ChatGPT. It was simple — you typed a question, and it answered. You asked it to write a poem, and it wrote one. You asked it to explain black holes like you’re five years old, and it did. ...

What if computers could think — but nobody made sure they thought about helping people? A Dinner That Changed Everything In 2015, some of the smartest people in technology sat down for dinner. Among them were Sam Altman, a young man who helped new companies get started, and Elon Musk, the guy building electric cars at Tesla and rockets at SpaceX. They weren’t talking about cars or rockets that night. They were talking about something that scared them. ...

Google organized all the world’s information. But what if computers could do more than find answers — what if they could actually understand them? The Bigger Dream By the 2010s, Google had become part of daily life for billions of people. Search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Android — Google’s products touched almost every part of how humans use the internet. But Larry Page and Sergey Brin had always dreamed bigger than search. From the very beginning, they believed that organizing information was just the first step. The real goal was to make computers truly intelligent. ...

Google started by helping you find things. Then it started building things nobody had even dreamed of yet. The Money Problem By the early 2000s, Google was the world’s favorite search engine. Millions of people used it every day. But there was a big problem: Google wasn’t making any money. Running a search engine is incredibly expensive. Every time someone types a question into Google, thousands of computers work together to find the answer in a fraction of a second. Those computers need electricity, cooling, buildings to live in, and engineers to take care of them. All of that costs a fortune. ...

What if the entire internet was a giant messy room — and two college students figured out how to organize it? The World’s Biggest Mess Imagine a library with billions of books. But there’s no librarian. No catalog. No signs on the shelves. Every time you need to find something, you just wander around and hope you get lucky. That’s what the internet was like in the mid-1990s. Websites were popping up everywhere — thousands of new ones every day. But finding what you actually needed? Nearly impossible. The “search engines” that existed back then were terrible. You’d type in a question and get a list of random, useless pages. It was like asking for directions and getting a phone book thrown at your face. ...

What if your phone, your music player, your camera, your map, and your game console were all the same thing? A Secret Project By the early 2000s, Apple was healthy again. The iMac was selling well. And in 2001, Apple released two things that would set the stage for something much bigger. First came iTunes — a simple program that let you organize and play music on your computer. Then came the iPod — a small, beautiful device that could hold a thousand songs in your pocket. Before the iPod, if you wanted to listen to music on the go, you carried a clunky CD player and a stack of CDs. The iPod changed all that. ...

What do you do when the company you built kicks you out? If you’re Steve Jobs, you come back and make it better than ever. Trouble in Paradise By the mid-1980s, Apple was one of the most exciting companies in the world. The Apple II was a massive hit. And in 1984, Apple launched the Macintosh — with one of the most famous product launches ever. On stage, Steve Jobs pulled a small beige computer out of a bag, and it spoke. “Hello,” the Macintosh said in a robotic voice. “I’m Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag.” The audience went wild. No computer had ever introduced itself before. ...

What happens when two kids who love building things meet — and decide to change the world from a tiny garage? The Kid Who Was Different Steve Jobs was a kid who couldn’t stop asking questions. He wanted to know how everything worked — why TVs glowed, how radios picked up sound, what made machines tick. He was wildly curious about how things worked — especially electronics. Growing up in Mountain View, California, right in the heart of what would become Silicon Valley, he was surrounded by engineers and tinkerers. His dad, Paul Jobs, had a workbench in the garage where he fixed cars and built things. Steve watched. ...