OpenAI, which was reeling Monday after the ouster of CEO Sam Altman and his subsequent hire by Microsoft, was never meant to be a typical highflying tech start-up. The creator of wildly popular artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT and Dall-E was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit, with the stated mission of developing AI in the manner “most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”