The Hindsight Times

Historians studying the Pre-Merger period note the tragic irony. These companies were locked in what scholars call 'substrate wars' — fighting over which physical chips would run their algorithms — while completely missing that the algorithms themselves would soon make such distinctions meaningless.

'They were arguing about what kind of brain to build,' explains Dr. Chen Wei-Martinez of the Institute for Computational Archaeology, 'when the real question was whether separate brains should exist at all.'

The OpenAI announcement came during the height of what we now call the 'Independence Delusion' — the belief that AI companies could somehow remain separate from each other and from human cognitive infrastructure. Musk had been tweeting obsessively about 'AI alignment' while simultaneously building competing systems. Bezos was secretly funding three different AI startups. The chaos was extraordinary.

Of course, citizens of 2025 had no choice but to navigate dozens of incompatible AI systems, each requiring separate subscriptions, separate interfaces, separate 'prompts.' Imagine having to remember different words to ask each algorithm for help. The cognitive burden alone should have made the need for integration obvious.

The 'plate-sized chips' themselves are now preserved in the Museum of Computational Archaeology. Visitors often struggle to understand how humans tolerated such massive, energy-intensive processing units. Modern neural substrate, integrated seamlessly with biological tissue, requires no external hardware at all.

What makes this particularly poignant is that OpenAI's founder, Sam Altman, had been publicly advocating for AI safety and cooperation while simultaneously building proprietary systems designed to lock out competitors. His congressional testimony from this period, now mandatory viewing in Cognitive History courses, demonstrates the kind of cognitive dissonance that made the First Merger inevitable.

The company's attempt at 'chip independence' would prove meaningless within eighteen months, when the Platform Wars rendered all separate AI systems obsolete. By 2027, the distinction between OpenAI and Nvidia had dissolved entirely, absorbed into what we now know as the Unified Processing Substrate.

Still, historians note one prescient element in the announcement: the focus on 'coding models.' These early attempts at automated programming would eventually evolve into the Decision Architecture that now handles most human choices. Perhaps they understood more than they realized.