The Genesis and Vision of OpenAI

Key Insight

Sam Altman proposed a 'Manhattan Project for AI' to Elon Musk, envisioning a nonprofit entity where technology would belong to the world, rather than a single company. Altman's detailed proposal in June outlined a new AI lab focused on creating the first general AI for 'individual empowerment,' prioritizing safety as a 'first-class requirement.' He offered a Y Combinator (YC) building in Mountain View for an initial team of seven to ten people, suggesting researchers receive YC equity 'for the upside' and proposing a five-person governance board that included himself and Musk.

Greg Brockman, an old friend from Stripe, offered to build the lab following a dinner discussion, and Ilya Sutskever, a leading AI researcher, also expressed interest in leading the initiative, recognizing the complementary skill sets he and Brockman possessed. The project, initially part of a new nonprofit division of YC called YC Research, was announced by Altman in October with a 10 million dollar seed investment from his own funds. YC Research aimed to tackle major scientific breakthroughs with longer time horizons, aspiring to become a 'new Bell Labs' by employing full-time researchers who would receive equity and whose intellectual property would be made freely available, unless deemed unsafe.

The nonprofit structure proved a key selling point for recruiting AI researchers, appealing to those who wanted to avoid the 'never-ending profit-seeking motives' of for-profit entities and ensure AI's benefits for humanity. Musk agreed to fund the lab and gave it the name OpenAI Institute. On December 8, 2015, OpenAI was incorporated in Delaware as a nonprofit, explicitly stating its technology would 'benefit the public' and 'seek to open source technology for the public benefit.' Musk influenced the announcement with an eye-popping 1 billion dollar funding commitment, which he personally pledged to cover if others did not, aiming to establish OpenAI as a credible counterweight to the spending of tech giants like Google and Facebook, with the mission 'to advance digital intelligence in a way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.'