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With the popularity of ChatGPT in the news, I've seen on many occasions now where the headline would refer to OpenAI as having been founded or co-founded by Elo
by hbarka 4y ago
With the popularity of ChatGPT in the news, I've seen on many occasions now where the headline would refer to OpenAI as having been founded or co-founded by Elon Musk. Granted it makes a good lead story inserting Musk into it but how true is this claim? I hope karpathy can put this question to rest: can Elon Musk claim to be a co-founder of OpenAI in the true sense of being part of the founding team? (Recall the Tesla founders story.)
According to the blog entry at https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/ https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/, the founding members are:
"OpenAI’s research director is Ilya Sutskever, one of the world experts in machine learning. Our CTO is Greg Brockman, formerly the CTO of Stripe. The group’s other founding members are world-class research engineers and scientists: Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba."
Elon Musk is mentioned as a donor. And so is AWS, Infosys, and Reid Hoffman.
"Sam, Greg, Elon, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research are donating to support OpenAI. In total, these funders have committed $1 billion"
Surely, donors cannot claim to be founders of OpenAI, the same as how VCs cannot claim to be the founders of startups they fund. If this were the case, then Jeff Bezos, owner of AWS then, could have the same claim as a co-founder of OpenAI.
- codeulike 4y agoThe bit you quoted from https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/ https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/ goes on to say "OpenAI’s co-chairs are Sam Altman and Elon Musk." Did you not read that far? Wired had a couple of articles in 2015/2016 about the founding of OpenAI https://www.wired.com/2016/04/openai-elon-musk-sam-altman-plan-to-set-artificial-intelligence-free/ https://www.wired.com/2016/04/openai-elon-musk-sam-altman-pl... https://www.wired.com/2015/12/elon-musk-snags-top-google-researcher-for-new-ai-non-profit/ https://www.wired.com/2015/12/elon-musk-snags-top-google-res...
- hbarka 4y agoSo? It's not unusual for large donors to become an honorary chair of a company. VCs get this privilege oftentimes. There is literally nothing in the OpenAI announcement that he's a founder. Websites like Wired and Buzzfeed ran with it because people would shrug if the story went that the founders are Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba. Who? No it can't be them, it's Elon Elon!#
- codeulike 4y agoHow do you define founder exactly? Does being there for the initial discussions, helping get the team together, being on the board and being a co-chair and helping fund the whole thing count?
- hbarka 4y agoDid you also not read that far where it explicitly says who the founders are? I hope you are not confusing founders with funders.
- codeulike 4y agoIf you really want to split hairs, https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/ https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/ actually says 'founding members', which is not necessarily the same thing as 'founder'. You are focussing too much on that one sentence from the one announcment. You need to look at what actually happened at the time. Founder is not a legal term. There is a central registry where you can go and look up who the directors of a company are, but there is no such official place to record founders. Founder is a vernacular term that simply means one who is instrumental in the origination of an organization (or other initiative). For all intents and purposes, if you look at how OpenAI got founded, Musk was one of the founders. Just my opinion: To me, it sounds like Sam Altman wanted Elons name attached to the project in order to attract talent. Read the wired article I linked above. Fair game, thats an important part of getting the thing started. In return Elon got to embed some of his ideas (e.g. I'm pretty sure the Open bit of OpenAI was partially his influence, back in 2015 he talked a lot about the dangers of AI being developed behind closed doors). Maybe he wasnt very involved once it got started; that would hardly be suprising. But still, he was involved in the founding for very specific reasons.
- 93po 4y agoThis feels like super pointless speculation because unless you were there in the room there's no way to know what Elon did or did not contribute to the founding. Elon was on stage when they announced OpenAI in 2015. He was co-chair with Sam. They presumably both worked to get the founding team in place. The idea of OpenAI was both of theirs. He likely put up more than $100 million for its founding. Elon wasn't "on the team" any more than Sam at the start. But no one questions whether Sam is a founder.