Ronan Farrow

And one of those people was Elon Musk.

These two things are deeply interrelated.

Yes, Sam Altman could have presented this with a for-profit motive more openly and perhaps earlier, his critics say.

But part of the power of his pitch was that he went to Elon Musk and he said, I hear you.

This could destroy humanity.

We need to put something together and we need it to be safety first.

And it can't just be about racing to get the technology first.

This has to be a scenario where we're willing to slow down on development first.

to keep it safe.

It was all rooted in a fear-driven argument.

And that was why Google was the bad guy, because Google is for-profit, they're the megacorporation, so we're going to be the good guys.

And that was, as Andrew alluded to, a really powerful recruiting tool, because part of OpenAI's strength was not only did Sam Altman, through these quite extraordinary powers of persuasion, present this sort of fear-driven rationale why he needed to get the money for this,

He also was able to go to the brightest minds in the field and say, this is a nonprofit.

We may not be able to pay as much as Google, but we can give you something else, which is we're the good guys.

So what happened a few years ago?

There are certainly specific episodes over the history of OpenAI that have not yet been extensively reported.

We have a detailed account of a moment where critics within the company allege, and people threatened to quit over this, a plot was entertained at the highest levels of the company to sell the next generation of this technology, AGI, when it comes, to the highest international bidder to pit China and Russia and the United States against each other.

And that really did prompt some of the safety-minded people in the company to say, you know, as one tells us, this is insane.

I mean, potentially a situation where Vladimir Putin has disproportionate control of the most dangerous technology in the world.

Now, we should say this is something that ultimately did not come to fruition.