Elon Musk and the Birth of OpenAI

When I announced this thing,

nobody in the world wanted it.

I had no purchase orders, not one.

Nobody wanted to buy it.

Nobody wanted to be part of it.

Except for Elon. He goes,

he was at the event and

we were doing a fireside chat

about the future of self-driving cars.

I think it was like 2016.

At that time, it was 2015.

And he goes, you know what?

I have a company that could really use this.

I said, wow, my first customer.

And so I was pretty excited about it.

And he goes, yeah, we have this company.

It's a non-profit company.

And all the blood drained out of my face.

I just spent a few billion dollars building this thing.

Cost $300,000.

And the chances of a non-profit being able

to pay for this thing is approximately zero.

And he goes, you know, this is an AI company.

And it's a non-profit.

And we could really use one of these supercomputers.

And so I picked it up.

I built the first one for ourselves.

We're using it inside the company.

I boxed one up.

I drove it up to San Francisco.

And I delivered it to Elon in 2016.

A bunch of researchers were there.

Peter Beal was there.

Ilya was there.

There was a bunch of people there.

And I walk up to the second floor

where they were all kind of in a room.

It's smaller than your place here.

And that place turned out to have been OpenAI.

2016.

Just a bunch of people sitting in a room.