Through the course of my reporting, I would come to conclude something even more startling. Not even in Silicon Valley did other companies and investors move until after ChatGPT to funnel unqualified sums into scaling. That included Google and DeepMind, OpenAIās original rival. It was specifically OpenAI, with its billionaire origins, unique ideological bent, and Altmanās singular drive, network, and fundraising talent, that created a ripe combination for its particular vision to emerge and take over. āI get the sense that Sam is the most ambitious person on the planet,ā a former employee says. In other words, everything OpenAI did was the opposite of inevitable; the explosive global costs of its massive deep learning models, and the perilous race it sparked across the industry to scale such models to planetary limits, could only have ever arisen from the one place it actually did.