Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World

by Parmy Olson

“I was one of the investors in DeepMind, and I was very concerned that Larry [Page] thinks Demis works for him. Actually, Demis just works for himself,” Musk said, according to a person who was there. “And I don’t trust Demis.” The researchers were astonished. To many of them, it sounded like Musk had a personal issue with Hassabis more than any particular worry about where AI was headed. When he was asked about his antagonism for Hassabis, he mentioned the computer games that the British entrepreneur had designed in the past that focused on world domination. At the same session, Musk recounted a conversation he’d had with another investor in DeepMind, who’d said that during an earlier meeting with Hassabis, “I felt like it was at that point in a movie where somebody should get up and shoot the guy.” In other words, somebody needed to stop Hassabis from building an all-powerful AGI. But as much as Musk didn’t seem to like Hassabis, he would remind OpenAI staff that DeepMind was ahead, and he held up the British company’s research work as a benchmark they needed to target. As the months passed, Musk grew more and more concerned that OpenAI’s technology simply wasn’t as powerful as DeepMind’s, according to former OpenAI staff.