The recent trial that put Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on opposite sides made it clear the two billionaires agreed on one thing: building artificial intelligence would require significant resources, and enormous amounts of money.
It may seem obvious now, as an AI-obsessed stock market helps finance a global construction boom of chipmaking factories and energy-hogging data centers to keep chatbots running, but testimony and evidence showed how people with outsized control of the AI industry were privately debating its costs nearly a decade ago.
"Even raising several hundred million won’t be enough,” Musk said in a 2018 email to Altman and other OpenAI co-founders about what he increasingly saw as a futile attempt to compete with Google.
"This needs billions per year immediately or forget it."
The soaring costs factored into the trajectory of OpenAI, which began in 2015 as a nonprofit dedicated to developing AI for the common good and is now a capitalistic enterprise valued at $852 billion.
