■ In this week’s Backchannel:As Nvidia, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft forge partnerships and deals, the industry looks like one big daisy-chain. What does that mean for all of us?
It all began, as many things do, with Elon Musk. In the early 2010s he realized that AI was on a track to become perhaps the most powerful technology of all time. But he had deep suspicion that if it were to fall under the control of powerful profit-driven forces, humanity would suffer. Musk had been an early investor in DeepMind, the UK-based lab that was ahead of the pack in pursuing artificial general intelligence. After Google bought DeepMind in 2014, Musk cut ties with the research organization. He felt it was essential to create a counterforce incentivized by human benefit, not profits. So he helped create OpenAI. When I interviewed Musk and Sam Altman at the company’s unveiling in 2015, they were adamant that shareholder profit would not be a factor in their decisions.
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