My conversation with Brockman and Sutskever continued on in circles until we ran out the clock after forty-five minutes. I tried with little success to get more concrete details on what exactly they were trying to build—which by nature, they explained, they couldn’t know—and why then, if they couldn’t know, they were so confident it would be beneficial.

At one point, I tried a different approach, asking them instead to give examples of the downsides of the technology. This was a pillar of OpenAI’s founding mythology: The lab had to build good AGI before someone else built a bad one.

Now, AI is the harbinger of the fourth industrial revolution. The keystone of the modern superpower. AGI, if ever reached, will solve climate change, enable affordable health care, provide equitable education. OpenAI is the poster child for this line of thought. It cannot say how the technology will deliver on these promises—only that the staggering price society needs to pay for what it is developing will someday be worth it.

As ChatGPT swept the world by storm in early 2023, a Chinese AI researcher would share with me a clear-eyed analysis that unraveled OpenAI’s inevitability argument. What OpenAI did never could have happened anywhere but Silicon Valley, he said. In China, which rivals the US in AI talent, no team of researchers and engineers, no matter how impressive, would get $1 billion, let alone ten times more, to develop a massively expensive technology without an articulated vision of exactly what it would look like and what it would be good for.

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, OpenAI’s original rival. It was specifically OpenAI, with its billionaire origins, unique ideological bent, and Altman’s singular drive, network, and fundraising talent, that created a ripe combination for its particular vision to emerge and take over. “I get the sense that Sam is the most ambitious person on the planet,” 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.

Microsoft was also a challenging partner; many felt it had far too much bureaucracy and required too much hand-holding to make the most of OpenAI’s models. By relying on the tech giant to deliver its technologies to the public, OpenAI was also losing visibility into and data from its users and, most importantly, control over its vision.