Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

by Karen Hao

After the Omnicrisis, the competition facing OpenAI had only accelerated. Musk was expanding his computing capacity at an alarming pace to build xAI. Anthropic’s latest version of Claude was pulling customers away from ChatGPT. Sutskever had officially formed his new rival company, Safe Superintelligence, and had only just announced a starting $1 billion in funding. At the same time, after over a year of work, OpenAI was still struggling to attain the desired performance for Orion to justify its release. The company was beginning to stare down the barrel of an uncomfortable prospect: Its tried-and-true formula of scaling no longer seemed to be enough to work; to advance its AI systems further, it likely needed fundamentally new research ideas. This was far easier said than done in general, but even more so after OpenAI had spent years orienting its hiring and team organization around exploiting existing research rather than exploring uncharted science.