Elon Musk wanted to take charge of OpenAI in 2018, says Semafor's Reed Albergotti
A war is brewing between Tesla's Elon Musk and another company he founded, Open AI. Following Musk's departure from Open AI and the arrival of a chat GPT, rumors are swirling that Musk could now aim to launch another AI startup. Join us now with the story Reed Albergotti, semaphore's technology editor. And what Bill Gates said something, this is going to be bigger than the personal computer. Now I'm scared, Reed. AI. Are you real? It is.
It is just here. Are these your words or are you a bot? No, I these are my words. I. So, no, it is it is it is quite astonishing, honestly. And I think that, you know, what we revealed in this in this story this morning is that, you know, Elon Musk basically had this, you know, Open AI had the hottest startup. He helped create it. And then back in 2018, he completely lost faith in it and just basically bailed.
He had promised a billion dollars that he was going to donate to it. It was a nonprofit at the time. And then just left and didn't give any more money. And you know, after he left, Open AI decided that they were going to they needed a lot of money. There's been this new discovery called the transformer model. And it was pretty clear it was just going to take a lot of money to train this thing because it was sort of a bigger, the bigger it is, the better it is kind of thing. And they decided to become a for profit.
And now Musk has been on Twitter, sort of criticizing them for making this transition. And you know, it's it's it's kind of ironic because he kind of helped push them in that direction. It is that is interesting. So how many players eventually that well, we don't know, do we? But do you agree that this is this we're on the cusp of something really significant? Is this going to be another I think of a singularity type? We don't even know what's coming because it's so eventful. We don't know. I mean, I do agree. I think this is going to be a complete game changer.
Some people are afraid that this artificial intelligence is going to rise up and sort of and take us over like like in the Terminator or something. I don't think that we're headed in that direction quite yet. I think what we're looking at, though, is a lot of disruption, a lot of people being displaced by computers. That was already happening. It's just going to accelerate now. And I think it's going to be a destabilizing force. I mean, the other thing that we revealed in this story, which I am shocked by is that Sam Altman, who is the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, it's now a $30 billion company.
It's the hottest company in technology. They created chat GPT and Dolly. He doesn't have any equity in this company. I mean, he's essentially, when in history have you had the CEO of the hottest company basically not earning any money for his work. And that is really a testament to just how strange this industry is and how people in this industry view it. I don't think there's been this consternation in a new technology since like the nuclear bomb. Right.
We've all read, you know, Isaac Azbar. We know that there's three rules. We definitely need to get straight with these robots and with AI because we want to outlast what we create, don't we? I mean, if they don't need us, that's the big fear. That is. I mean, you know, the other thing though to keep in mind is that I think a lot of the problems that that AI is going to cause has to do with problems in society that we already have and that we probably need to fix anyway. On the other hand, there's a lot of upside to this technology. I mean, it's going to be huge in life sciences and drug discovery.
Yeah, I've seen that already. I mean, think about it. The power of being able to do how many calculations in a second when you're with rational drug design where you're looking for, you know, a compound with a very complex structure and trying to figure out the best one to bind to something. This should be amazing what we're able to do with it. It should cut the time that it takes to develop these things from from years down to basically could be minutes or seconds. Exactly. I mean, things like that where you don't need to have be 100% right all the time.
You just need the computer to come out with some really great guesses. That's what a lot of drug discovery is about. It's very valuable. It's also incredibly valuable in materials sciences, which is important for climate change. We have to find new ways to make batteries and new ways to create energy. Superconductors that can transfer electricity without any resistance. All that kind of stuff is extremely valuable and this will help in that.
So I think it's one of these things where it's actually probably going to be great for humanity, I think. But we have to be really careful. I mean, you have to look at the things that it disrupts and try to deal with those issues, which we really haven't in the last 20, 30 years as technology has really kind of changed society. We haven't caught up to that in policy making and I think we need to be on our toes here.
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