On May 25, 2015, Sam Altman sent an email to Elon Musk proposing a “Manhattan Project for A.I.” He envisioned a Silicon Valley research lab that would build enormously powerful artificial intelligence and share it with the rest of the world “via some sort of nonprofit.”
Mr. Musk replied that evening, saying the idea was “probably worth a conversation.” Before the end of the year, the two tech entrepreneurs founded a nonprofit they called OpenAI.
When Mr. Musk founded OpenAI with Mr. Altman and several young A.I. researchers, he saw the research lab as a necessary counterweight to the A.I. work underway at Google. He believed that Google and Larry Page, one of its founders, did not understand the dangers of A.I.
OpenAI’s founders — backed largely by donations from Mr. Musk — vowed to freely share their technology with the public as open source software. They argued that A.I. would be too powerful and too dangerous to be controlled by a single company.
But by late 2017, many inside OpenAI were arguing that open sourcing may be more dangerous than keeping the technology closed. And they worried that if the lab remained a nonprofit, it might not raise the money needed to reach its lofty goal of building artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the human brain can do.
That included Mr. Musk. In February 2018, he forwarded an email to the lab’s other founders suggesting that OpenAI attach itself to Tesla, his electric car company, and build its A.I. using the supercomputers that Tesla was developing.
“Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google,” he wrote. “Even then, the probability of being a counterweight to Google is small. It just isn’t zero.”
After Mr. Altman and others refused to give Mr. Musk control, he quit. Later that month, he announced his departure to OpenAI’s staff on the top floor of the lab’s office in San Francisco. He withdrew his financial support for the lab.
Forced to find other sources of funding, Mr. Altman bolted a for-profit company onto the original nonprofit and eventually raised $13 billion from Microsoft. The lab also curtailed its efforts to open-source its technologies.
OpenAI has since emerged as one of the most important tech companies in the world, worth an estimated $730 billion as a for-profit company overseen by the original nonprofit. The start-up is heading toward one of the biggest initial public offerings in history, which could come as soon as this year.
The company has expanded to more than 4,000 employees working in offices around the world, and is pursuing a data center expansion plan that could cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
