Get the latest tech news
The Fear That Inspired Elon Musk and Sam Altman to Create OpenAI
Emails released by OpenAI to refute a lawsuit from Elon Musk show how he, Sam Altman, and other cofounders were motivated by fears of Google's dominance.
In one message Musk offers to fold OpenAI into his electric-car company Tesla to provide more resources, an idea originally suggested by an email he forwarded from an unnamed outside party. Strikingly, although OpenAI likes to describe its mission as focused on creating artificial general intelligence—machines smarter than humans—its founders spend more time discussing fears about the rising power of Google and other deep-pocketed giants than excited about AGI. A month before the nonprofit was incorporated, Google’s AI program AlphaGo had learned to play the devilishly tricky board game Go well enough to defeat a champion human player for the first time.
Or read this on Wired
