“The Secret History of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and OpenAI”, 2023-03-24 (; backlinks):
After 3 years, Elon Musk was ready to give up on the artificial intelligence research firm he helped found, OpenAI. The nonprofit had launched in 2015 to great fanfare with backing from billionaire tech luminaries like Musk and Reid Hoffman, who had as a group pledged $1.3$12015 billion. It had lured some of the top minds in the field to leave big tech companies and academia. But in early 2018, Musk told Sam Altman, another OpenAI founder, that he believed the venture had fallen fatally behind Google [ie. Demis Hassabis & DeepMind], people familiar with the matter said.
And Musk proposed a possible solution: He would take control of OpenAI and run it himself.
Altman and OpenAI’s other founders rejected Musk’s proposal. Musk, in turn, walked away from the company—and reneged on a massive planned donation. The fallout from that conflict, culminating in the announcement of Musk’s departure on February 20, 2018, would shape the industry that’s changing the world, and the company at the heart of it. The conflict would also create a public rift between the two most important players in technology today, Musk and Altman.
…Greg Brockman, an OpenAI co-founder who was chief technology officer at that time, also opposed Musk’s takeover as did others at OpenAI. A power struggle ensued, according to people familiar with the matter. Altman, who also ran the powerful startup accelerator Y Combinator, stepped in. According to tax documents, he added president to his title in 2018, in addition to being a director. [see his YC firing]
…Musk then stepped down from OpenAI’s board of directors. Publicly, he and OpenAI said the reason for his departure was a conflict of interest. Tesla, which was developing its own artificial intelligence for autonomous driving, would be competing for talent with OpenAI…But few people at OpenAI believed Musk was leaving for that reason, and a speech he gave at OpenAI’s offices at the time of his departure, which focused mainly on the potential conflict of interest, was not received well by most employees, who didn’t entirely buy the story. [see also Reid Hoffman being forced out over “conflicts of interest”]
An OpenAI announcement said Musk would continue to fund the organization, but Musk did not, according to people familiar with the matter. He had promised to donate roughly $1.3$12015 billion over a period of years (he had already contributed $0.13$0.12015b), but his payments stopped after his departure, people familiar with the matter said. That left the nonprofit with no ability to pay the astronomical fees associated with training AI models on supercomputers. [At this point, principally OA5]
…That fall, it became even more apparent to some people at OpenAI that the costs of becoming a cutting edge AI company were going to go up. Google Brain’s “transformer” had blown open a new frontier, where AI could improve endlessly. But that meant feeding it endless data to train it—a costly endeavor. OpenAI made a big decision to pivot toward these transformer models.
…When ChatGPT launched in November, OpenAI instantly became the hottest new tech startup, forcing Google to scramble to play catchup. Musk was furious, according to people familiar with the matter. In December, a month after the launch of ChatGPT, Musk pulled OpenAI’s access to the Twitter “fire hose” of data—a contract that was signed before Musk acquired Twitter. On Feb. 17, he tweeted “OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft.” On March 15, he tweeted, “I’m still confused as to how a non-profit to which I donated ~$129.69$1002015m somehow became a $30b market cap for-profit. If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it?” OpenAI declined to comment. Musk didn’t respond to a request for comment but on Friday, he tweeted “I’m sure it will be fine” and a meme of Elmo with the words: “Me realizing AI, the most powerful tool that mankind has ever created, is now in the hands of a ruthless corporate monopoly.”
On Thursday, The Information reported that Shivon Zilis, an OpenAI board member, had stepped down. Zilis, who gave birth to Musk’s twins, did not respond to requests for comment.
…It’s personal for him too, because his new role as CEO of OpenAI is a comeback story. “I failed pretty hard at my first startup—it sucked!–and am doing pretty well on my second”, he tweeted last month… “The thing i wish someone told me during the first one is that no one else thinks about your failures as much as you do, and that as long as don’t psych yourself out you can try again.” Altman won’t make any money on his new startup, but he’s earned himself a place in history.
Notable:
OpenAI has changed a lot over the years and this piece in MIT Technology Review—which got special access to the company—explores whether it is staying true to its mission.
Sam Altman was profiled in depth in this 2016 New Yorker article [”Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny: Is the head of Y Combinator fixing the world, or trying to take over Silicon Valley?”], which offers some good insight into the company’s early days.
Come for the fateful dinner at the Rosewood Hotel where OpenAI was first dreamed up, stay for the Napa Valley courtship, described in this Wired article where 9⁄10 AI whizzes agree to become founding researchers at OpenAI.