{"id":12562,"date":"2023-09-06T15:20:19","date_gmt":"2023-09-06T15:20:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mysourcefunding.com\/startups\/what-openai-really-wants\/"},"modified":"2023-09-06T15:20:20","modified_gmt":"2023-09-06T15:20:20","slug":"what-openai-really-wants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mysourcefunding.com\/?p=12562","title":{"rendered":"What OpenAI Really Wants"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sutskever became an AI superstar, coauthoring a breakthrough paper that showed how AI could learn to recognize images simply by being exposed to huge volumes of data. He ended up, happily, as a key scientist on the Google Brain team.<\/p>\n

In mid-2015 Altman cold-emailed Sutskever to invite him to dinner with Musk, Brockman, and others at the swank Rosewood Hotel on Palo Alto\u2019s Sand Hill Road. Only later did Sutskever figure out that he was the guest of honor. \u201cIt was kind of a general conversation about AI and AGI in the future,\u201d he says. More specifically, they discussed \u201cwhether Google and DeepMind were so far ahead that it would be impossible to catch up to them, or whether it was still possible to, as Elon put it, create a lab which would be a counterbalance.\u201d While no one at the dinner explicitly tried to recruit Sutskever, the conversation hooked him.<\/p>\n

Sutskever wrote an email to Altman soon after, saying he was game to lead the project\u2014but the message got stuck in his drafts folder. Altman circled back, and after months fending off Google\u2019s counteroffers, Sutskever signed on. He would soon become the soul of the company and its driving force in research.<\/p>\n

Sutskever joined Altman and Musk in recruiting people to the project, culminating in a Napa Valley retreat where several prospective OpenAI researchers fueled each other\u2019s excitement. Of course, some targets would resist the lure. John Carmack, the legendary gaming coder behind Doom<\/em>, Quake<\/em>, and countless other titles, declined an Altman pitch.<\/p>\n

OpenAI officially launched in December 2015. At the time, when I interviewed Musk and Altman, they presented the project to me as an effort to make AI safe and accessible by sharing it with the world. In other words, open source. OpenAI, they told me, was not going to apply for patents. Everyone could make use of their breakthroughs. Wouldn\u2019t that be empowering some future Dr. Evil? I wondered. Musk said that was a good question. But Altman had an answer: Humans are generally good, and because OpenAI would provide powerful tools for that vast majority, the bad actors would be overwhelmed. He admitted that if Dr.\u00a0Evil were to use the tools to build something that couldn\u2019t be counteracted, \u201cthen we\u2019re in a really bad place.\u201d But both Musk and Altman believed that the safer course for AI would be in the hands of a research operation not polluted by the profit motive, a persistent temptation to ignore the needs of humans in the search for boffo quarterly results.<\/p>\n

Altman cautioned me not to expect results soon. \u201cThis is going to look like a research lab for a long time,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

There was another reason to tamp down expectations. Google and the others had been developing and applying AI for years. While OpenAI had a billion dollars committed (largely via Musk), an ace team of researchers and engineers, and a lofty mission, it had no clue about how to pursue its goals. Altman remembers a moment when the small team gathered in Brockman\u2019s apartment\u2014they didn\u2019t have an office yet. \u201cI was like, what should we do?\u201d<\/p>\n