One excerpt stuck out for me – on Brockman’s idea to play China, Russia, and other world powers against each other:
In 2017, Amodei hired Page Hedley, a former public-interest lawyer, to be OpenAI’s policy and ethics adviser. In an early PowerPoint presentation to executives, Hedley outlined how OpenAI might avert a “catastrophic” arms race—perhaps by building a coalition of A.I. labs that would eventually coördinate with an international body akin to NATO, to insure that the technology was deployed safely. As Hedley recalled it, Brockman didn’t understand how this would help the company beat its competitors. “No matter what I said,” Hedley told us, “Greg kept going back to ‘So how do we raise more money? How do we win?’
According to several interviews and contemporaneous records, Brockman offered a counterproposal: OpenAI could enrich itself by playing world powers—including China and Russia—against one another, perhaps by starting a bidding war among them. According to Hedley, the thinking seemed to be, It worked for nuclear weapons, why not for A.I.? He was aghast: “The premise, which they didn’t dispute, was ‘We’re talking about potentially the most destructive technology ever invented—what if we sold it to Putin?’”
Brainstorming sessions often produce outlandish ideas. Hedley hoped that this one, which came to be known internally as the “countries plan,” would be dropped. Instead, according to several people involved and to contemporaneous documents, OpenAI executives seemed to grow only more excited about it. Brockman’s goal, according to Jack Clark, OpenAI’s policy director at the time, was to “set up, basically, a prisoner’s dilemma, where all of the nations need to give us funding,” and that “implicitly makes not giving us funding kind of dangerous.” A junior researcher recalled thinking, as the plan was detailed at a company meeting, “This is completely fucking insane.” Executives discussed the approach with at least one potential donor. But later that month, after several employees talked about quitting, the plan was abandoned. Altman “would lose staff,” Hedley said. “I feel like that was always something that had more weight in Sam’s calculations than ‘This is not a good plan because it might cause a war between great powers.’ ”
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