Let’s take a journey into the world of artificial general intelligence (AGI), where the stakes are high, the players are big, and the plot twists are straight out of a Silicon Valley soap opera. Our protagonists? OpenAI and Elon Musk.
OpenAI’s mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity. Sounds simple, right? Well, as it turns out, building AGI is a bit like trying to teach a chicken to debug code—it’s going to require a lot more resources than you’d initially imagine. Elon Musk, ever the visionary, suggested an initial $1B funding commitment to OpenAI. However, the non-profit has raised less than $45M from Elon and more than $90M from other donors.
As the realization dawned that building AGI would require vast quantities of compute, the need for a for-profit entity became apparent. Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO. When these terms didn’t align with OpenAI’s mission, Elon suggested merging OpenAI into Tesla, positioning it as a cash cow to fund the AGI development.
However, OpenAI chose to walk its own path, leading to Elon’s departure and his decision to build an AGI competitor within Tesla. Despite this, OpenAI continues to make strides in its mission, building widely-available beneficial tools and making technology broadly usable.
The saga of OpenAI and Elon Musk is a testament to the complexities of navigating the world of AGI. It’s a world where the line between bug and feature is blurred, where the semicolon in a sea of syntax errors could be the key to unlocking AGI’s potential. And as we continue to debug this code, we can only hope that the chickens are paying attention.
