OpenAI has brought about the AI revolution through ChatGPT, and it appears that its lead in the AI race was always a part of the plan.
Sam Altman had pitched OpenAI to Elon Musk as a “Manhattan Project for AI” all the way back in 2015. The Manhattan Project, of course, was the US government’s top-secret research initiative during World War 2 to develop a nuclear bomb, and its success changed the course of the world and modern history. It appears that Altman wanted OpenAI to similarly run a low-profile operation with the best scientists to create Artificial General Intelligence.
Altman had used the phrase “Manhattan Project for AI” in an email to Elon Musk written on 25th May 2015. “Been thinking a lot about whether it’s possible to stop humanity from developing Al,” Altman wrote in the email. “I think the answer is almost definitely not,” he had added.
“If it’s going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first,” Altman reasoned. “Any thoughts on whether it would be good for YC to start a Manhattan Project for Al? My sense is we could get many of the top-50 (reseachers) to work on it, and we could structure it so that the tech belongs to the world via some sort of nonprofit but the people working on it get startup-like compensation if it works. Obviously we’d comply with/aggressively support all regulation,” he wrote.
It appears that Musk was on board with the idea. Around two hours later, Musk replied with “Probably worth a conversation”.
It appears that the conversation did materialize. Around 8 months after this email was sent, Elon Musk launched OpenAI. OpenAI brought together some of the world’s top AI researchers, with Ilya Sutskever serving as its Research Director and Greg Brockman serving as its CTO. OpenAI was initially structured as a non-profit, with several companies and Musk contributing money without getting any equity in return.
But it was this non-profit structure that became a bone of contention between Musk and Altman. As emails from 2017 reveal, Sam Altman wanted to raise money for OpenAI through unconventional means, including an ICO (Initial Coin Offering), and wanted to convert the company into a for-profit enterprise. This didn’t sit well with Musk, who pulled funding and dissociated himself from the company. OpenAI, however, managed to find other backers, including a Microsoft investment in 2019, and launched ChatGPT in late 2022. ChatGPT, of course, took the world by storm, and made OpenAI the pre-eminent name in Artificial Intelligence. Musk has since sued OpenAI for allegedly illegally changing itself into a for-profit company, and now calls Sam Altman untrustworthy, and even came up with the “Swindly Sam” moniker for him over his moves in changing OpenAI’s corporate structure.
But even as those court cases will play out, it’s remarkable how big the vision behind OpenAI was even back in 2015. Sam Altman and Elon Musk seemed take the challenge of humanity developing AI squarely on their shoulders, and believed that the company will change the world. There’s a fairly good chance that OpenAI will end up changing the world, but in a positive way — the Manhattan Project which Sam had compared OpenAI to did end up killing more than 200,000 people when nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The trajectory of AI, one would hope, goes a little differently.