Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A.I. to Google, Facebook, and the World

by Cade Metz

Altman had brought them together in the hopes of building a new AI lab that could serve as a counterweight to the labs that were rapidly expanding inside the big Internet companies, but no one knew if that was possible. Brockman certainly wanted to build one after leaving Stripe, one of Y Combinator’s most successful companies. He had never actually worked in AI and had only recently bought his first GPU machine and trained his first neural network, but as he told Altman a few weeks earlier, he was intent on joining the new movement. So, too, was Musk, after watching the rise of deep learning inside Google and DeepMind. But no one was sure how they could enter a field that was already dominated by the richest companies in Silicon Valley. So much of the talent had begun making enormous sums of money inside Google and Facebook, not to mention Baidu, newly invigorated after poaching Andrew Ng as chief scientist, and Twitter, which had just acquired two notable deep learning start-ups. Altman had invited Sutskever and a few other like-minded researchers to the Rosewood to help explore the possibilities, but they spent the evening asking questions rather than giving answers. “There was this big question: Is it too late to start a lab with a bunch of the best people? Is that a thing that can happen? No one could quite say it was impossible,” Brockman remembers. “There were people who said: ‘It’s really hard. You need to get this critical mass. You need to work with the best peop...