Musk Claims OpenAI Accelerated the AI Race, But Reality Is More Complex

In December 2015, in an unassuming office in San Francisco, Elon Musk and a few friends sat around a whiteboard. He had just returned from a closed-door meeting with Google DeepMind and didn't look too happy. At the time, Google nearly monopolized the world's top AI talent, and DeepMind's algorithms were crushing humans at Go. What worried Musk most was—if this technology ended up controlled by a few people, humanity might not even be able to reach the off switch. He proposed establishing a non-profit organization named OpenAI, with 'Open' right there in the name. An engineer present later said Musk slammed the table and declared: 'We need to democratize AI; we can't let Google have the final say.'