Elon Musk’s Last-Ditch Effort to Control OpenAI: Recruit Sam Altman to Tesla

Editor's take

Internal communications from 2017 disclose Elon Musk's early attempts to leverage Sam Altman and potentially Demis Hassabis for a nascent AI venture, predating OpenAI's formal establishment and its subsequent trajectory with models like GPT-3 and GPT-4. This revelation underscores the intense competition and strategic maneuvering that characterized the foundational stages of leading AI research, highlighting Musk's persistent interest in shaping the field's direction.

The significance lies in understanding the historical context of AI development, where key figures were actively exploring different paths for AI advancement. This information provides a counter-narrative to the commonly accepted origin story of OpenAI and suggests that Musk's vision for artificial general intelligence may have diverged significantly from the path taken by the organization he co-founded.

Future analysis should focus on the extent to which these early discussions influenced subsequent AI research directions, both within Tesla and at other emerging AI labs. It will be important to observe if any concrete technological or strategic decisions at Tesla can be directly traced back to these discussions, and how this information might reframe the public perception of the relationship between Musk, Altman, and the early days of AI's commercialization.