OpenAI offices in San Francisco.Credit…Jason Henry for The New York Times
In May 2015, Sam Altman sent an email to Elon Musk proposing a “Manhattan Project for AI.” He envisioned a research lab in Silicon Valley that would create immensely powerful artificial intelligence and share it with the rest of the world “through some non-profit organization.”
Mr Musk responded that evening, saying the idea was “probably worth talking about”. Before the end of the year, two tech entrepreneurs founded a non-profit organization they called OpenAI.
When Mr. Musk founded OpenAI with Mr. Altman and several young AI researchers, he saw the research lab as a necessary counterweight to the AI work going on at Google. He believed that Google and Larry Page, one of its founders, did not understand the dangers of AI
OpenAI’s founders — backed largely by donations from Mr. Musk — have vowed to share their technology freely with the public as open-source software. They argued that artificial intelligence would be too powerful and too dangerous for a single company to control.
However, in late 2017, many inside OpenAI argued that open source could be more dangerous than keeping the technology closed. And they worried that if the lab remained unprofitable, it might not get the money it needed to achieve its lofty goal of building artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a machine that could do everything the human brain could.
That included Mr. Musk. In February 2018, he forwarded an email to the lab’s other founders proposing that OpenAI join Tesla, his electric car company, and build its AI using the supercomputers Tesla was developing.
“Tesla is the only way that could even hope to hold a candle to Google,” he wrote. “Even so, the odds of you being a counterweight to Google are slim. It’s just not zero.”
After Mr. Altman and others refused to give Mr. Musk control, he quit. Later that month, he announced his departure to OpenAI staff on the top floor of the lab’s San Francisco office. He withdrew his financial support for the lab.
Forced to seek other sources of funding, Mr. Altman bolted the original non-profit into a for-profit company and eventually raised $13 billion from Microsoft. The lab has also scaled back its efforts to open source its technologies.
OpenAI has since become one of the most important technology companies in the world, valued at an estimated $730 billion as a for-profit company overseen by the original non-profit organization. The start-up is headed for one of the largest initial public offerings in history, which could come as early as this year.
The company has expanded to more than 4,000 employees working in offices around the world and is pursuing a data center expansion plan that could cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
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