What Next: TBD | Inside OpenAI's Empire

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4 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2025

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

OpenAI started as a non-profit dedicated to building safe A.I. Now, they’re obsessed with building artificial general intelligence by any means necessary - even if they don’t quite know what that is. Guest: Karen Hao, reporter and author of “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI” Want more What Next TBD? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to get access wherever you listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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1:01.0	In August of 2019, reporter Karen Howe went to visit the San Francisco headquarters of OpenAI.
1:12.0	It had started as a nonprofit research lab that said it was dedicated to fundamental AI research with no commercial focus, no commercial intent.
1:22.7	At the time, Karen was covering AI for MIT Tech Review. An Open AI was the buzzing new kid on the block.
1:30.0	It had money, big names, and lofty ambitions to develop artificial general intelligence,
1:36.9	AGI for the good of society.
1:40.0	Then Open AI, which had really built a mission around the idea that it would be fully transparent and open source all of its research,
1:49.9	withheld its first piece of research for sort of unclear, ambiguous reasons.
1:56.0	And then it restructured as an organization.
2:00.0	A few months earlier, the nonprofit that controlled OpenAI set up a for-profit arm and got
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