FounderingOpenAI Part 1: The Most Silicon Valley Man Alive
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, shot to tech stardom with the release of ChatGPT. His company is one of the most valuable startups in the world, and he is treated like an ambassador for the AI future, zipping around the globe, meeting with world leaders. But how did he amass so much power? In this episode, reporter Ellen Huet looks at Altman’s rise and his penchant for forming close bonds with powerful Silicon Valley figures, who in turn have lent their influence and money to his ever-growing ambitions.
It's a Wednesday in November twenty twenty three. I'm standing in a dark restaurant in San Francisco. There are a few dozen people. It's the after party for an AI conference. People are standing and chatting in small circles. Waiters are bringing trays of arderubs around. I'm biting into a tiny Porcini mushroom doughnut when I hear a whisper. Sam Altman has walked into the restaurant. I try to spot him in the dim lighting. I've talked to Sam here and there over the years. He's been around the startup scene for more than a decade, and he's friendly to journalists and over time, Sam Altman has become basically the most Silicon Valley man alive. He's the CEO of open Ai, which shot to tech startum a year ago with the release of chat GPT. His company is worth eighty six billion dollars. It's one of the most valuable startups in the world. For the past six month months, Sam had been everywhere. It seemed like every major news outlet wanted to profile him, and he was saying yes to each one. Headlines referred to him as the chat GPT King, the Oppenheimer of our age, and an AI overlord. He was like an ambassador for the AI future, zipping around the.
Globe meeting with world leaders.
He testified in front of Congress and amid all that he decided to pop by this AI conference party a little surprise visit. So I see him standing in a corner of the restaurant. A few people have already clustered around him. I decide to say hi. He's wearing a suit and a tie, more dressed up than usual, and he's shorter than I remember. We shake hands. He eyes my conference badge and says, it's good to see you. I'm surprised by how personable he is, how friendly he comes across. He acts like he remembers me. He already knows I'm working on this podcast. So I say to him, I'm about to put in a request to your comms team to see if we can find a time to interview you. He's like, sure, sounds good. Several people are hovering, hoping to get his attention for a minute, so I step away, and after about ten minutes at the party, he leaves too. The next day, Sam continues his tour as the Statesman of AI. He speaks at APEC, a big conference at President Biden and China's leader Shijin being both attended. Here's Sam at that conference talking about AI.
I think this will be the most transformative and beneficial technology humanity has yet invented. I think this is like the greatest weep forward of any of the of the big technological revolutions we've had so far. So I'm super excited. I can't imagine anything more exciting to work on, and getting to do that is like the professional honor of a lifetime. It's so fun to get.
To work on that, the most transformative technology humanity has yet invented, the professional honor of a lifetime. Sam clearly believes the world is about to change dramatically and fast, and he's aware that a lot of that change is connected to him. And the day after that, less than forty eight hours after I saw Sam at that party, less than twenty four hours after he spoke at a major international gathering of world leaders, he was fired.
Breaking news. Sam Altman is out as CEO of OpenAI.
This is a stunner.
The tech world has been thrown into chaos over the weekend when the company that gave us chat GPT fired it's CEO. The move came as a complete surprise to everyone, including open AI's biggest investor.
Microsoft board says it pushed Altman out after a review found he was quote not consistently candid in his communications with the board.
It's hard to emphasize enough how shocking this was. Sam Altman got fired. It was the juiciest tech news of the year and completely unexpected. The news came on a Friday afternoon, and my colleagues and I all immediately knew our weekends were out the window. The next few days felt like a hurricane of news. The board implied Sam had lied to them. They announced a new CEO. Then came a regretful public apology by someone who had fired Sam. There were pledges of loyalty, an employee revolt, and at the same time something else was happening. It started to seem like Sam was actually going to come back. He was rallying the support of his employees and Microsoft. It was looking like Sam could win. On Tuesday night, Sam was reinstated as CEO at the company that just five days earlier had basically tried to destroy him. Sam managed to get the upper hand once again. It was high drama, a jaw dropping turn of events, but for those who know Sam, it actually made perfect sense. One of Sam's mentors is an investor named Paul Graham. He once told a reporter Sam is extremely good at becoming powerful. To me, this seems like Sam's defining characteristic. Often in Silicon Valley we talk about tech visionaries who are programming geniuses or obsessed with the details and design of the product. That's not Sam. His strongest, most unique skill is wielding power, and that might have consequences for all of us. You're listening to Foundering, I'm Ellen Hewitt. In this season of Foundering, we're going to chronicle the rise of Sam Alman, the all out arms race to build the leading AI company, the claim that this new technology could threaten to wipe out all of humanity if we're not careful, and then the coup that almost took down the guy at the top of it all before he managed to.
Claw his way back.
For this season, you'll hear reporting done by me and my colleagues at Bloomberg who have been covering AI during the boom of the last few years. We interviewed some of the leading minds in AI to try to cut through the hype and understand the debate about whether AI will be a tool to improve human existence or to extinguish it. But this is also the story of Sam, the man at the center of it all, and we spoke with Sam's friends, family, and collaborators to demystify him and how he rose to power. This first episode is all about how Sam got here. He's a man who has always understood the importance of being in the right room at the right time, with exactly the right few people. The full story of Sam's rise is important because understanding who he is and what he believes will shed light on an earth question should we trust this man to oversee this technology? In the summer of twenty twenty three, about five months before he was fired, my colleague Emily Chang asked him this exact question at a Bloomberg conference.
You have an incredible amount of power at this moment in time.
Why should we trust you?
You shouldn't If this really works, it's like quite a powerful technology, and you should not trust one company, and certainly not one personalize it.
You shouldn't trust me. If he believes that, then why did Sam fight his way right back to the top of Open AI, back into that position of control, as if to insist he should be the person to lead this company as they develop AI as fast as possible. To a lot of people, the stakes are terrifying. They're higher than anything else really in the valley. Some people refer to Artificial General intelligen or AGI as the last invention, something so potent that everything that comes after will look unrecognizable compared to everything leading up to it. Inside Open AI, some employees talk about how they are building God.
We'll be right back.
To get a better sense of the kind of person Sam is and how he got where he is now. I want to take you back to his adolescence. Sam had a privileged upbringing in Saint Louis. He's the oldest of four siblings. His mom was a dermatologist and his dad was a real estate developer. He attended a private high school called John Burrows. There's an anecdote about him from that period that sticks out. When some students wanted to boycott an assembly about sexuality, Sam stood up in front of the whole school and announced he was gay. It's a pretty gutsy move for a teenager in the early two thousands, and unsurprisingly, Sam smart.
And generally Sam he was. He was an exceptional student, He was an exceptional writer, he was an exceptional big personality.
That's Andy Abbott. He was one of Sam's English teachers, and he's now the head of school. And this is a pretty nerdy school where it's cool to get good grades and be a high achiever. And even in that environment, Sam stood out.
Sam's just a really natural leader, incredibly charismatic, curious guy. He's a typical you know. He was the editor of the yearbook and he represented the school in the Model United Nations. He designed our website, you know, before we hired people to do our website. He could just do that stuff.
Sam even played water polow.
He was pretty good. I'm not a connoisseur, but I'm like, he was pretty good.
He remembers Sam as being really confident, and apparently for good reason. Sounds like Sam was just this exceptional kid.
Well, he's the smartest guy in the room, and he's charismatic. I remember thinking, and I'm just this is just an embarrassing confession. I hope he doesn't go into technology. He's so creative and he's so, he's such a good writer, and I hoped he would be an author or something like that. And I mean, nobody could have anticipated the magnitude of open Ai, but everybody knew that this guy's better at most things than most of us are.
This speaks to a pattern that'll become a crucial factor in Sam's career. He's very good at impressing people, especially the right people, older people, people with influence, people who are at a position to help him. Someone who knows Sam says his superpower is figuring out who's in charge and charming them. So we have young Sam. Even though he was a teenager, he acted like someone older with more agency and confidence. Adults found this quality of his admirable, and he acted like this toward his three younger siblings too. In a big New Yorker profile on Sam, his younger brother said that as kids, they used to play a board game called Samurai, and Sam always won because he declared himself the leader and said, I have to win and I'm in charge of everything. When Sam's brother told this story, it was a jocular exchange. But Annie, their youngest sibling and only sister, sees it differently. These days, she's estranged from Sam and the rest of her immediate family, but when she was a kid, she remembered that same quality of Sam's wanting to be in charge, and to her it wasn't funny, it was domineering.
From my perspective, with nine year age difference, he very much wanted to be and acted like the third parent and like being the older sibling in charge, in control.
For instance, even though the family was Jewish, they used to get a Christmas tree until Sam put his foot down.
I don't have memories of Christmas tree because when Sam got farmits food at thirteen, he decided that we as a family unit were Jews and needed to no longer celebrate Christmas.
There were no more Christmas trees.
When their dad passed away in twenty eighteen, Annie remembers that Sam dictated to each of his younger siblings how many minutes they could talk at the funeral.
To be at your dad's funeral, to be like, oh, I'm the oldest sibling, so I get to choose how long all the sibling which it is bizarre, and there's a level of it that's so hilarious and so benign. Surface level, classic older sibling bullshit where it's like, all right, older sibling wanting to make.
Up the rules to the game.
Like there's a level of it that's very light and funny, and there's also a level of it that's very dark and deeply unsettling of how does that behavior come up in other places if you believe that you get to be the authority on something that you are not the authority on.
A spokeswoman for open Ai told us that Sam recalls these incidents differently, but she declined to elaborate. And so when Sam finished high school, he started down this path that's pretty textbook for the tech industry, studying computer science at Stanford, founding a startup, and dropping out of Stanford, and he made one incredibly important decision he applied to why Combinator. Why Combinator is a startup accelerator. It's basically a boot camp for startups. You and your co founders apply and if you're accepted, you spend three months hacking away trying to build a company. At the end of that period, you give a demo to investors and try to raise venture capital. Sam was actually in the first ever group of founders at y Combinator. Everyone calls it YC. By the way, it was two thousand and five, so YC was totally unknown, just a bunch of young guys hanging out in Cambridge, Massachusetts for a summer writing code. But WYC would eventually become this enormously powerful network. Now it's basically the number one elite program for startups. It's really hard to get in, and the alumni network is incredibly strong. Sam was nineteen years old when he joined YC, and once again he impressed just the right person, Paul Graham, the head of YC. The first batch included some other really impressive people, like the founders of Reddit and Twitch, but someone who knows Sam says that he was immediately Paul's favorite. Paul later wrote, within about three minutes of meeting him, I remember thinking, ah, so this is what Bill Gates must have been like when he was nineteen. The startup Sam was building was called Looped. Looped is one of the forgotten apps of its time the early two thousands, when people were really excited about having GPS on their phones for the first time. It used location data to connect people to their friends and local businesses, kind of like a mix of Yelp, and four Square. Here's Sam making the pitch at a developers conference.
Luped is about connecting with people on the go, which is, after all, the main reason you have a phone. We show you where people are, what they're doing, and what cool places are around you.
Sam started building the startup in two thousand and five. The iPhone didn't exist yet, so Looped was trying to do this for flip phones and it was kind of hard to get traction. At one point early on, Sam's company was in a desperate situation. They really needed to get a deal with a mobile carrier. They learned that Boost Mobile, which was part of Sprint, was looking to add a location feature and needed a partner, but they were about to sign with someone else, so Sam flew down to Boost's headquarters in Irvine in southern California. When he tells the story, he says that he just showed up, waited outside the right executive's office, and asked for just ten minutes. Here's how that executive remembers it.
It's ever recall I got a phone call from Sam and he was in Irvine, and he said that he explained who he was and what Looped was somebody at Sprint had told him to get in touch with us.
That's Lowell Winer. He was at the time the head of business development for Boost. And he's going to tell a story that has a few asides, but that I think captures a lot about what Sam was like.
Early on, we were a day or two away from signing a contract with another startup that was further along than Looped. He asked to come by that day, you know, which is incredibly unusual, but given the timing that, you know, we were at the eleventh hour we were at to sign this contract. He had come, you know, referred to us by our parent company, it was worth at least a meeting. So Sam shows up at the office with one of one or two other guys from Looped. We go sit in the conference room, you know, we share what we were looking to do. Sam started to share about Looped. He was I think nineteen at the time, you know, I think maybe in cargo short sitting cross legged in a in a chair in the conference room and just kind of holding court.
I want to pause here for a second on this cargo shorts detail. For a lot of Sam's young life, he was a cargo shorts. Devotee wore them all the time. People kind of poked fun at him for it, to the point where he felt the need to address it on a podcast called Masters of Scale.
Honestly, I don't think they're that ugly, and I find them incredibly convenient. Like I I, you can like put a lot of stuff like I like to. I'd still read paperback books. I like paperback books. I like to carry on around with me. I have like an iPhone seven plus, which is kind of like works really well in cargo pockets. I carry like computer chargers, cables. They're just like, you know, efficient. Why people care about that so much that I can't.
Tell you that last comment? That's very Sam to remark that the things normal people might talk about don't make sense or aren't rational. It's like he has no patience for the things most of us might think are funny. He has more important things to think about anyway. Here he is a nineteen year old in a meeting with mobile network executives wearing cargo shorts, sitting cross legged in a conference room chair. Even though this encounter was almost twenty years ago, Lowell remembers vividly what Sam looked like in that moment, because it was such an odd picture.
He's a he was small in stature. I don't think he's a big guy now, but he was. You know, he was quite slim at the time. You know, it's no easy feat to sit cross legged in a conference chair. I mean, he looked like he could have still been in high school.
I've heard other people describe Sam's weird way of sitting. He's older now, so he doesn't do it as much, but one person who knows him told me he used to squat on the seat of a chair like a perched bird, with his knees up toward his chin. Despite this unconventional way of presenting himself or because of it, he almost immediately convinced Lowell that boost Mobile should switch plans at the eleventh hour and go with this other partner.
It was pretty clear within a half hour of this meeting starting that Luked and Sam were the right partner to do this. There was both excitement and like, shit, we have to go sell it internally. But I recall stepping outside of the room with the colleague that I was in the meeting with and saying to him, we need to switch gears.
And Lowell still remembers this way that Sam looks unassuming, but he's not.
On the one hand, visually he looked incredibly young, but if you'd shut your eyes and were just listening to him, his command of material and his ability to communicate and engage was on par with anyone you know I had met with over the course of my tech career. It Uh, it was freakish. Yeah, it was screakish, and not his appearance, but his his poise and command for.
That age, Sam's relentlessness paid off. He knew he had to get that deal, and he did what he needed to do to get it, including flying across the state to surprise someone at their office. Sam later said he learned an important lesson the way to get things done is to just be really persistent. So he inks this deal for Looped, it's going to power location sharing for boost Mobile. It's the partnership that led to this two thousand and six ad campaign.
Oh you see where I meant here, but I know where you at Poop Slooped the GPS.
Now you know where your friends.
At Sam's peers at YC were surprised that he pulled this off. Lup's business model was pretty wobbly and the product wasn't all that impressive, but Sam's particular strength was starting to become clearer.
It was obvious Sam was an incredible deals guy.
That's a clip from a podcast interview with Emmett Sheer, one of the other guys in that very first YC batch. You can hear how impressed he was by Sam's particular talent.
He was somehow convincing the phone companies to give his startup that like didn't really have a product like deals. I still don't know how he did that, And like that was the only obvious thing about Sam at the time, was like that he was ambitious, but most of us were pretty ambitious, and he was great at great great deals guy.
For the next few years, luped kept growing. Sam presented at Apple's Developer Conference into thousand and eight in a very unique outfit. He wore two polo shirts layered on top of each other, so he's in a hot pink polo with a second lime green collar poking out underneath.
I'd like to invite up Sam Altman, Sam K.
Scott, we are incredibly psyched about lupt on the iPhone. Luped is about connecting with people and what cool places are around you. The orange pin up there is where I am right now, and the blue pins represent my friends. We make serendipity happen.
And when you listen to Sam pitching Loot, you can hear this other part of him, this earnestness and optimism. I've listened to and read a lot of interviews with Sam and he's always using the words super and excited, sometimes super excited.
It's super cool, super easy to make, super important. It's been super great.
I'm super excited to announce.
I'm super excited, super excited for that.
But he was not super excited about what happened next at lut. After several years, Looped fizzled out. Sam made a deal to sell the company for a modest sum in twenty twelve. He walked away with a reported five million dollars. Most people would be pretty happy with this outcome, but in Silicon Valley terms, Loop twa was kind of a failure. But that's okay because by then Sam had won over other people who could help him. One was Peter Teel, who was a billionaire, an investor, and the co founder of PayPal and Palanteer. He's also one of the most powerful gay men in Silicon Valley, which lent him and Sam a sense of camaraderie. When Sam left looped, Peter gave him a bunch of money to invest. They were close, and Sam's peers noticed because Peter Teel is notoriously pessimistic and even nihilistic, and Sam's public image, by contrast, is pretty earnest and optimistic. At the same time, Sam was deepening his relationship with Paul Graham, the head of YC, and that closeness was giving Sam tangible benefits. When Paul had the chance to invest very early on in Stripe the Payments startup, he invited Sam to invest too. Sam later said that that was by some measures, his most profitable angel investment ever, and he got it purely because of this personal relationship he had built. Paul is known for writing essays about how to build startups, essays filled with blunt, quotable entrepreneurial wisdom. Often in those essays he praised Sam. He advised young eager founders to emulate Sam, and Paul is also responsible for one of the most infamous quotes about Sam. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in five years and he'd be the king. At first, this quote sounded to me like a compliment, but lately I've wondered if maybe it's not anyway. Around twenty twelve, Why had become very influential. It had relocated its headquarters from Cambridge to Silicon Valley and was now a breeding ground for some of the most successful Internet businesses. Airbnb, Dropbox, and Stripe all got their start at YC, and from the outside it looked as though Sam was beginning to mimic Paul as a startup guru. He was also advising young founders at YC, and just like Paul, he started writing essays filled with mysterious, often perplexing advice for startup founders, such as the most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion or here's another A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage at the time, most people don't even try. In a blog post called how to Be Successful, Sam told founders that they should quote have almost too much self belief. The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion. That last point will sound familiar to people who know Sam. One of them told me that Sam has complete self belief. That Sam gives off the impression that he believes in himself one hundred percent without that nagging feeling most of us have, like a little voice of fear or uncertainty. And here's Lowell again, the former boost Mobile executive.
He was extraordinarily self assured, and not in an egotistical way, but just very comfortable with himself, with his capacity both intellectually and relationally.
For years, Paul had built up Sam's image, made him this kind of startup demigod. Then he decided to anoint him fully. Paul stepped down in twenty fourteen and named Sam President of YC.
This was a big deal.
YC is the center of Silicon Valley, and now Sam was its leader. He was twenty eight years old. With both Peter Teel and Paul Graham, Sam cultivated these close relationships with people and positions of power. Then they gave him things like money, connections, influence titles. Essentially, they transferred some of their power directly to him, and that in turn gave Sam the ability to think big. Even when he was working on something pretty silly sounding like looped, Sam had sky high ambitions. Paul noticed this. Here he is at a conference explaining why he picked Sam to be his successor at YC.
It's turned into this giant thing and I'm no good at running giant things.
Sam, however, is going to be good at running a giant thing.
At this point, there was no evidence Sam could run a giant thing or even a medium sized thing. But once he took over, Sam did make YC much bigger than before sprawling. He gave more money to more startups, and he expanded overseas.
The Sam Altman era at YC was about expansion.
That's John Coogan. He's a startup founder who went through YC twice, including ones for his company Soylent, you know, the one that made food powder for tech people.
Why C went from you know, a summer program for startups with just a couple companies to doing all sorts of things, venture investing with the Continuity Fund, nonprofit work with YC research. There's definitely a there's a feeling of like, Okay, how much should YC really be doing? Should this organization be doing everything.
During his time at YC, John noticed a couple things about Sam.
He's very good at switching gears and listening very intently. I think that's what's really that's really like a superpower. I heard someone describe him as the Michael Jordan of listening.
A lot of people have described this intensity of Sam's to me. When he listens, he also stares. It can almost feel unsettling. And now that Sam was running YC, he could become kind of a covert operator. He had all of his deal making skills from his Loop days, and now his network and influence was way bigger. If there was ever a problem, he could make a call and fix it fast.
Early, very early in my business career, I had a very tough negotiation going on, and I wrote Sam this email saying like, Hey, I'm in this negotiation. I just want to reality check some stuff with you, and he called me immediately. We talked for like five minutes and he completely solved my problem, and it was like one of the best business deals in my life. It was like, actually left a really really like big impact on me. I've personally seen Sam resolve a one hundred million dollar issue in a thirty minute phone call, fifteen minute phone call. It's really remarkable, and I think Sam just thinks about it in human terms. It's like, this person wants X, this person wants why. How can we bring these two people together.
YC was growing, but Sam's ambitions were even larger. When he became president, he started taking on pet projects. One of his interests was nuclear fusion. To encourage more people to build startups in this area, he expanded yc's scope to include hard tech startups, that is, companies building tech where there's some doubt that it'll work at all. Until that point, YC had been almost exclusively about Internet software. He also spun up a research arm at YC and assigned researchers to projects he wanted to explore. One example was universal basic income. The idea is to give every person a regular income, regardless of whether they work. So under Sam's command, YC created a study to give money no strings attached to families in Oakland. This move is one that Sam turns too often. He'll have an idea for something he thinks should exist, and then he pulls in people and money to encourage someone to do it. Bending the world to his will. As he wrote in his blog, he's kind of like the maestro of an orchestra, not playing the instruments himself, but conducting his symphony. And in twenty fifteen he'll have the chance to do this again, this pattern of finding an important topic, then arranging to get the right people and the right money on board to build it. This time the focus is AI. It'll all take place at a dinner. At dinner, that'll change everything.
We'll be right back.
Okay, here's a bit of Silicon Valley lore. It's often told that in twenty fifteen Elon Musk was worried, or at least Elon was going around telling everyone he was deeply distraught over the state of artificial intelligence. Back then, the biggest powerhouse in AI was Google. It had so much money, and it had hired all the best researchers. They had Google Brain, and then they acquired deep Mind. It's a British lab that was working on some of the most exciting things in AI at the time, AI that could be more fluid and self taught. Google's early lead particularly disturbed Elon because he was worried about the possibility that AI could start to grow too powerful, especially if an AI entity began to improve itself, and he was really worried about the guy in charge of it all.
So I used to be close friends with our page, and I would say at his house and we'd have these conversations long into long into the evening about AI, and I would I would be constantly urging him to be careful about the danger of AI, and and he just he was really not concerned about the danger of AI and was quite cavalier about it.
That's Elon on CNBC. I'm always surprised by how catual he sounds when he's telling the story of basically ending a friendship. But he loves this anecdote because it makes him sound smart and forward thinking.
And at the time, Google, especially after their acquisition of deep Mind, had three quarters of the world's AI talent. They had obviously a lot of computers and a lot of money. But the person who controls that does not, or at least that did not seem to be concerned about AI safety. That sounded like a real problem. So and then the final straw was Larry calling me a specist for being pro human consciousness instead of machine consciousness. And I'm like, well, yes, I guess I am.
At the time, a lot of experts thought the idea of developing AI so powerful and that it threatened the human species was laughable because AI was still having trouble distinguishing between a picture of a chihuahua and a picture of a blueberry muffin. But to Elon it was a real threat. Here he is speaking with Walter Isaacson at a conference. He sounds serious, even alarmed.
I don't think most people understand just how quickly machine intelligence is advancing. It's much faster than almost anyone realizes. Even within Silicon Valley, people really have no idea.
Why is that dangerous?
If there's some digital superintelligence, particularly if it's engaged in recursive self improvement, and its optimization or utility function is something that's detrimental to humanity, then it will have a very bad effect.
You know.
It could be just something like getting rid of spam email or something, and it's like concludes, well, the best way to get over spam is to get rid of humans, you know, But why would we lose source of all spam.
I know we've all watched Howl in two thousand and one.
The audience actually laughed at him because what he was saying sounded so outlandish. At the time, Elon was increasingly feeling like he had to do something to dilute Google's power, but he might have also been driven by something else. Here's Ashley Vance, my colleague at Bloomberg, who wrote a biography of Elon twenty thirteen.
Elon was He was not the guy we know today. I mean, he was doing okay, but Tesla was kind of just barely starting a hitted stride. SpaceX was doing pretty well. Elon was worth probably a few billion dollars. Definitely not the richest person in the world.
Elon's friends at the time were among the richest people in the world, Larry Page and Saragey Brinn, the co founders of Google.
I was interviewing Elon a lot then, I was working on a book about him, and it was clear to me that he was looking over at his friends who were doing really well and everything they did, and they had these software empires and this growing AI empire. And my sense of where Elon's thoughts about AI started to originate was part jealousy. I thought he looked at Google and all the success it was having and the success as friends were having and he had nothing like that. But he would never admit this out loud that he was jealous.
Okay, So AI was top of mind for Elon, and in twenty fifteen he attended this dinner at the Rosewood Hotel. It's this swanky place on sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, right near some of the biggest venture capital firms in the valley. There were about ten people at this dinner, but for our purposes, here are the four most important ones. There's Elon, There's Sam. Then there are two other people, Ilia Sitskiver and Greg Brockman. Ilia worked at Google. It was a really well respected researcher in AI, and Greg had been one of the most important people at Stripe, taking it from a team of five people to a company worth billions of dollars. At dinner, they talked very seriously about AI and the threat that it could be misused or that it could lead to catastrophe. They talked about what it might take to build something that could compete with Google. They had the pieces there. Ilia's AI skills, Greg's operational experience, Elon's money, and Sam was there to orchestrate it all. At that dinner, Elon pledged to put a billion dollars towards this project. He came up with the name too. You can hear the pride in his voice when he describes the idea on CNBC.
Open ai refers to open source, So the intent was, what's the okay? So what was the opposite? What's the opposite of.
Google?
Would be an open source nonprofit because Google is closed sourced for profit, and that profit motivation can be potentially dangerous.
So that's the birth of open ai. They had an initial vision. Open ai would be a research lab and it would share its work openly with the public instead of trying to keep it private for its own gain. And it would be a nonprofit not focused on enriching the company, but instead focused on building a safe AI that would benefit humanity. It sounds good in theory, but those nonprofit open source ideals were about to get complicated fast. Open Eye's co founders soon found themselves locked in a power struggle and then urgently racing to raise billions of dollars, and Sam would come out on top again in a way that cemented his power even further. That's next time on foundering. Foundering is hosted by me Ellen Hewitt. Sean Wen is our executive producer. Molly Nugent is our associate producer. Blake Maples is our audio engineer, Mark Million and vandermain seth Fiegerman, Tom Giles and Molly Schutz are our story editors. We had production hell up from Jessica Nix and Antonio mufferetch. Thanks for listening. If you like our show, leave a review and most importantly, tell your friends.
See you next time.
