Inside the story that enraged OpenAI

At the time, few people beyond the insular world of AI research knew about OpenAI. But as a reporter at MIT Technology Review covering the ever‑expanding boundaries of artificial intelligence, I had been following its movements closely. Until that year, OpenAI had been something of a stepchild in AI research. It had an outlandish premise that AGI could be attained within a decade, when most non‑OpenAI experts doubted it could be attained at all. To much of the field, it had an obscene amount of funding despite little direction and spent too much of the money on marketing what other researchers frequently snubbed as unoriginal research. It was, for some, also an object of envy. As a nonprofit, it had said that it had no intention to chase commercialization. It was a rare intellectual playground without strings attached, a haven for fringe ideas. But in the six months leading up to my visit, the rapid slew of changes at OpenAI signaled a major shift in its trajectory. First was its con ... Read full article.