Empire of AI summary

The guests were all seated except for one – Elon Musk was over an hour late.

It’s 2015, and Sam Altman, the 30-year-old president of Y Combinator, is watching as guests arrive for an intimate dinner. The venue? The prestigious Rosewood Hotel. His guests? Some of Silicon Valley’s top minds on artificial intelligence. The agenda? One item: to discuss the future of humanity. Between courses of Wagyu beef, of course.

An hour after the dinner was meant to start, Musk finally arrives. For him, the purpose of the dinner is to put a stop to months of anxiety – an anxiety rooted in Google’s purchase of the AI lab DeepMind for a measly $500 million. It was keeping him awake at night, and even led to him clashing with his friend and Google cofounder, Larry Page. While Page saw superintelligence as the next logical step in evolution, Musk disagreed. Page even called Musk a “speciesist” – someone who discriminated against nonhuman intelligence.

After Musk took his seat at the table, Altman started to address the assembled group. Musk had studied Altman – in their email exchanges, the young man had said all the right things about AI safety. Altman’s stated goal was to create the world’s first general AGI, or artificial general intelligence – and to harness it for individual empowerment. Most importantly, they both shared the conviction that it should be safety-focussed and not for the purpose of profit. Or so Musk thought.

So they began to pitch their vision for an AI lab to all those assembled – one free from Google's commercial pressures. Musk pledged up to a billion dollars, and the deal was sealed. They would call it OpenAI and, importantly, it would be a nonprofit.

But by 2017, the nonprofit dream was meeting with a harsh reality. The reality was quickly dawning upon them that building AGI would require billions of dollars annually to afford the tens of thousands of GPUs needed. The nonprofit structure was a dead end. So, the leadership began to discuss what had been previously unthinkable: OpenAI had to transform into a for-profit company.

But who would be CEO of such an entity? A power struggle ensued. Musk’s plan was to fold OpenAI into Tesla, using his existing riches to battle Google. But Altman had different plans. He appealed directly to key leaders, framing Musk as too “erratic” to lead the company. Could they really trust AGI in the hands of one all-powerful, unpredictable man?

The maneuver worked and the showdown was over. In early 2018, outmaneuvered and defeated, Musk announced his departure at a tense all-hands meeting. He didn’t go quietly, though. He told the stunned employees that OpenAI would fail as a nonprofit – and that he would now pursue the mission of safe AGI at Tesla instead. He then walked away – and took his money with him.

Altman stood victorious, but he was the president of a company with a dangerously empty bank account. The safety-obsessed cofounder was gone. How could OpenAI plug the holes in its coffers?