OpenAI's Founding Dinner

A story about how Sam Altman orchestrated a pivotal dinner that led to the founding of OpenAI.

"Sam had a conversation with Elon Musk where they shared the same belief that artificial intelligence was going to be a big deal, and that we would one day realize AGI. They both thought it was scary because we don't know what's going to happen on the other side of AGI, so they wanted to fund research in a nonprofit to study how to safely create AGI.

Sam hosts this dinner in Palo Alto and gets Elon Musk there along with a few other key people. One was Greg, who was the CTO of Stripe at the time. He gets Ilya who was the lead research scientist in AI at Google, essentially one of the founding fathers of AI and deep learning. Reid Hoffman was there too.

Elon agrees to fund $40 million into the nonprofit. After the dinner, Sam offers Greg a ride back to San Francisco. The first 30 minutes of the hour-long drive, Greg just asked rapid fire like 150 questions. Then at the 30-minute mark, Greg goes 'Okay, I've decided I'm going to do this. I'll quit Stripe and join OpenAI.' So they spent the next 30 minutes making their plan.

Then Elon and Sam poached Ilya out of Google, which took a lot of money and persuasion. When Ilya joined OpenAI, the research community who worshipped this guy followed, and they got all the top researchers to join. That's the founding story of OpenAI."