“Ego, Fear and Money: How the AI Fuse Was Lit: The People Who Were Most Afraid of the Risks of Artificial Intelligence Decided They Should Be the Ones to Build It. Then Distrust Fueled a Spiraling Competition”, 2023-12-03 (; backlinks):
Elon Musk celebrated his 44th birthday in July 2015 at a 3-day party thrown by his wife at a California wine country resort dotted with cabins. It was family and friends only, with children racing around the upscale property in Napa Valley…The New York Times spoke with more than 80 executives, scientists and entrepreneurs, including two people who attended Musk’s birthday party in 2015, to tell that story of ambition, fear and money…A.I. was the big topic of conversation when Musk and Larry Page sat down near a firepit beside a swimming pool after dinner the first night. The two billionaires had been friends for more than a decade, and Musk sometimes joked that he occasionally crashed on Mr. Page’s sofa after a night playing video games. But the tone that clear night soon turned contentious as the two debated whether artificial intelligence would ultimately elevate humanity or destroy it. As the discussion stretched into the chilly hours, it grew intense, and some of the more than 30 partiers gathered closer to listen. Mr. Page, hampered for more than a decade by an unusual ailment in his vocal cords, described his vision of a digital utopia in a whisper. Humans would eventually merge with artificially intelligent machines, he said. One day there would be many kinds of intelligence competing for resources, and the best would win. If that happens, Musk said, we’re doomed. The machines will destroy humanity. With a rasp of frustration, Mr. Page insisted his utopia should be pursued. Finally he called Musk a “specieist”, a person who favors humans over the digital life-forms of the future. That insult, Musk said later, was “the last straw.”
…Musk and Mr. Page stopped speaking soon after the party that summer. A few weeks later, Musk dined with Sam Altman, who was then running a tech incubator, and several researchers in a private room at the Rosewood hotel [Rosewood Sand Hill] in Menlo Park, California a favored deal-making spot close to the venture capital offices of Sand Hill Road.
[the DeepMind founding & Geoff Hinton auction were previously reported in Genius Makers, 2021]
…The Birth of DeepMind: 5 years before the Napa Valley party and two before the cat breakthrough on YouTube, Demis Hassabis, a 34-year-old neuroscientist, walked into a cocktail party at Peter Thiel’s San Francisco townhouse and realized he’d hit pay dirt. There in Mr. Thiel’s living room, overlooking the city’s Palace of Fine Arts and a swan pond, was a chess board. Dr. Hassabis had once been the second-best player in the world in the under-14 category. “I was preparing for that meeting for a year”, Dr. Hassabis said. “I thought that would be my unique hook in: I knew that he loved chess.”
…With funding from Mr. Thiel, Eliezer Yudkowsky had expanded his AI lab and created an annual conference on the singularity. Years before, one of Dr. Hassabis’s two colleagues had met Mr. Yudkowsky, and he snagged them speaking spots at the conference, ensuring they’d be invited to Mr. Thiel’s party. Mr. Yudkowsky introduced Dr. Hassabis to Mr. Thiel. Dr. Hassabis assumed that lots of people at the party would be trying to squeeze their host for money. His strategy was to arrange another meeting. There was a deep tension between the bishop and the knight, he told Mr. Thiel. The two pieces carried the same value, but the best players understood that their strengths were vastly different. It worked. Charmed, Mr. Thiel invited the group back the next day, where they gathered in the kitchen. Their host had just finished his morning workout and was still sweating in a shiny tracksuit. A butler handed him a Diet Coke. The 3 made their pitch, and soon Mr. Thiel and his venture capital firm agreed to put £1.4 million (roughly $3.21$2.252010 million) into their start-up. He was their first major investor.
…Having won over Mr. Thiel, Dr. Hassabis worked his way into Musk’s orbit. About two years later, they met at a conference organized by Mr. Thiel’s investment fund, which had also put money into Musk’s company SpaceX. Dr. Hassabis secured a tour of SpaceX headquarters. Afterward, with rocket hulls hanging from the ceiling, the two men lunched in the cafeteria and talked. Musk explained that his plan was to colonize Mars to escape overpopulation and other dangers on Earth. Dr. Hassabis replied that the plan would work—so long as superintelligent machines didn’t follow and destroy humanity on Mars, too. Musk was speechless. He hadn’t thought about that particular danger. Musk soon invested in DeepMind alongside Mr. Thiel so he could be closer to the creation of this technology.
…The Lost Ethics Board: When Musk invested in DeepMind, he broke his own informal rule—that he would not invest in any company he didn’t run himself. The downsides of his decision were already apparent when, only a month or so after his birthday spat with Mr. Page, he again found himself face to face with his former friend and fellow billionaire.
The occasion was the first meeting of DeepMind’s ethics board [which legally controlled all DM IP], on 2015-08-14 [after the July 2015 acquisition]. The board had been set up at the insistence of the start-up’s founders to ensure that their technology did no harm after the sale. The members convened in a conference room just outside Musk’s office at SpaceX, with a window looking out onto his rocket factory, according to 3 people familiar with the meeting.
But that’s where Musk’s control ended. When Google bought DeepMind, it bought the whole thing. Musk was out. Financially he had come out ahead, but he was unhappy.
3 Google executives now firmly in control of DeepMind were there: Mr. Page; Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder and Tesla investor; and Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman. Among the other attendees were Reid Hoffman, another PayPal founder, and Toby Ord, an Australian philosopher studying “existential risk”.
[The members of the DM safety board or super-committee have never been reported before publicly.]
The DeepMind founders reported that they were pushing ahead with their work, but that they were aware the technology carried serious risks…Musk agreed. But it was pretty clear that his Google guests were not prepared to embark on a redistribution of (their) wealth. Mr. Schmidt said he thought the worries were completely overblown. In his usual whisper, Mr. Page agreed. AI would create more jobs than it took away, he argued…DeepMind’s founders were increasingly worried about what Google would do with their inventions. In 2017, they tried to break away from the company. Google responded by increasing the salaries and stock award packages of the DeepMind founders and their staff. They stayed put.
The ethics board never had a second meeting. [It being defunct has not been reported before; it is unclear whether the super-committee still exists, even de jure, post-Google Brain / DeepMind merger.]
[Birth of Anthropic] …But Dario Amodei was unhappy about the Microsoft deal because he thought it was taking OpenAI in a really commercial direction. He and other researchers went to the board to try to push Mr. Altman out, according to 5 people familiar with the matter. After they failed, they left. Like DeepMind’s founders before them, they worried that their new corporate overlords would favor commercial interests over safety. In 2021, the group of about 15 engineers and scientists created a new lab called Anthropic. The plan was to build AI the way the effective altruists thought it should done—with very tight controls. “There was no attempt to remove Sam Altman from OpenAI by the co-founders of Anthropic”, said an Anthropic spokeswoman, Sally Aldous. “The co-founders themselves came to the conclusion that they wished to depart OpenAI to start their own company, made this known to OpenAI’s leadership, and over several weeks negotiated an exit on mutually agreeable terms.” [would saying there was an attempt violate their possible lifetime non-disparagment NDAs?]
Anthropic accepted a $4 billion investment from Amazon and another $2 billion from Google two years later.
…The Reveal [to MS]: After OpenAI received another $2 billion from Microsoft, Mr. Altman and another senior executive, Greg Brockman, visited Bill Gates at his sprawling mansion on the shores of Lake Washington, outside Seattle. The Microsoft founder was no longer involved in the company day to day but kept in regular touch with its executives.
…Over dinner, Mr. Gates told them he doubted that large language models could work. He would stay skeptical, he said, until the technology performed a task that required critical thinking—passing an A.P. biology test, for instance.
5 months later, on Aug. 24, 2022, Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman returned and brought along an OpenAI researcher named Chelsea Voss. [Voss is very loyal to Altman & Brockman and so a good choice for a dog-and-pony show.] Ms. Voss had been a medalist in an international biology Olympiad as a high schooler. Mr. Nadella and other Microsoft executives were there, too. On a huge digital display on a stand outside Mr. Gates’s living room, the OpenAI crew presented a technology called GPT-4. Mr. Brockman gave the system a multiple-choice advanced biology test, and Ms. Voss graded the answers. The first question involved polar molecules, groups of atoms with a positive charge at one end and a negative charge at the other. The system answered correctly and explained its choice. “It was only trained to provide an answer”, Mr. Brockman said. “The conversational nature kind of fell out, almost magically.” In other words, it was doing things they hadn’t really designed it to do. There were 60 questions. GPT-4 got only one answer wrong.
Mr. Gates sat up in his chair, his eyes opened wide. In 1980, he had a similar reaction when researchers showed him the graphical user interface that became the basis for the modern personal computer. He thought GPT was that revolutionary.
By October, Microsoft was adding the technology across its online services, including its Bing search engine. And two months later OpenAI released its ChatGPT chatbot, which is now used by 100 million people every week.