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An OpenAI Story: From Hegemon to Underdog
How one of the most successful AI companies lost an edge it may never recover
OpenAI was the very image of AI.
A company with a grandiose mission, a visionary CEO, a history of influential research, and a billion-dollar backup — it had the world at its feet.
Now, it is but a shadow of what it was two years ago.
Since then, innumerable startups have emerged. They’re young, full of energy, and well-adapted to openness and fast-paced research.
They’re also effectively threatening OpenAI’s reigning: the community is about to relegate the once hegemon of AI to a mere underdog.
Promises, ambition, and controversy
It wasn’t always this way. There was a time people liked OpenAI.
Musk and Altman founded it in 2015 as a non-profit research institute to ensure the safest development of artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Safety and alignment were their top priorities, existential risk (x-risk) their main worry — and DeepMind the only threat to their mission.
The AI community saw OpenAI as an honest endeavor — even if not everyone shared their perception of x-risks being the most…
