It’s a lot for AI safety but for OpenAI at the time, with the backing of Elon Musk and the most respected AI researchers in the country, they could have raised a similar amount for series A funding at the time. (I’m unsure if they were a capped profit yet). Likewise, 1B was pledged to them at their founding, but it’s hard to tell how much was actually distributed out by 2017.
Agree with 2, but Safety research also seems hard to fund.
with the backing of Elon Musk and the most respected AI researchers in the country, they could have raised a similar amount for series A funding at the time
It’s not clear that Elon Musk was willing to give them even $30m in March 2017 (early 2017) when OpenPhil did, nor would anyone there believe that selling a large fraction of the company for just $30m in a seed round was a good idea. The rupture was not far away, that led to Musk completely leaving OA after trying & failing to eject Sam Altman. See https://openai.com/index/openai-elon-musk/
We spent a lot of time trying to envision a plausible path to AGI. In early 2017, we came to the realization that building AGI will require vast quantities of compute. We began calculating how much compute an AGI might plausibly require. We all understood we were going to need a lot more capital to succeed at our mission—billions of dollars per year, which was far more than any of us, especially Elon, thought we’d be able to raise as the non-profit.
And note Musk’s quoted emails later in 2018 are taking the all-or-nothing attitude of OA should either find a path to raise billions per year (not total), or give up and shut down. (Hence Andrej Karpathy’s proposal there to merge OA into Tesla and try to become a trillion-dollar company on self-driving AI, to make AGI pay its way.) If you believe that a non-profit needs >$2000m/year or it’s a total waste of money, how eager are you going to be to donate $30m, once? Seems like a good way to waste $30m by throwing good money after bad...
It’s a lot for AI safety but for OpenAI at the time, with the backing of Elon Musk and the most respected AI researchers in the country, they could have raised a similar amount for series A funding at the time. (I’m unsure if they were a capped profit yet). Likewise, 1B was pledged to them at their founding, but it’s hard to tell how much was actually distributed out by 2017.
Agree with 2, but Safety research also seems hard to fund.
It’s not clear that Elon Musk was willing to give them even $30m in March 2017 (early 2017) when OpenPhil did, nor would anyone there believe that selling a large fraction of the company for just $30m in a seed round was a good idea. The rupture was not far away, that led to Musk completely leaving OA after trying & failing to eject Sam Altman. See https://openai.com/index/openai-elon-musk/
And note Musk’s quoted emails later in 2018 are taking the all-or-nothing attitude of OA should either find a path to raise billions per year (not total), or give up and shut down. (Hence Andrej Karpathy’s proposal there to merge OA into Tesla and try to become a trillion-dollar company on self-driving AI, to make AGI pay its way.) If you believe that a non-profit needs >$2000m/year or it’s a total waste of money, how eager are you going to be to donate $30m, once? Seems like a good way to waste $30m by throwing good money after bad...
If OpenAI didn’t get the 30m from any other donor, they’d probably just turn into a capped profit earlier and raise money that way.
Also I never said Elon would have been the one to donate. They had 1B pledged, so they could have conceivably gotten that money from any other donors.
By the backing of Elon Musk, I mean the startup is associated with his brand. I’d imagine this would make raising funding easier.