The INSANE Truth About OpenAI

You have an incredible amount of power.

Why should we trust you?

>> Um, you shouldn't.

>> Since launching Chat GPT, OpenAI has

become one of the most influential and

valuable tech companies in the world.

But the story of what's going on behind

the scenes is crazy. From trying to

overthrow their CEO to completely

abandoning their original principles,

this video is the insane history of Open

AI. But it's also a journey through the

past, present, and future of artificial

intelligence.

And this is a story

that affects us all.

[Music]

[Music]

Sam Alman studied computer science at

Stamford, but he dropped out to work on

his own business. It was called Looped,

and it was a way of sharing your

location with friends using your phone.

However, since Sam started Looped before

the iPhone and the App Store even

existed, this proved to be a challenge.

But Sam worked tirelessly on the

business, mostly living off instant

noodles and ice cream. In fact, he

worked so hard and his diet was so poor

that he actually developed scurvy.

Then in 2005, he joined the first ever Y

Combinator class, which is basically a

boot camp for startups.

And it was here that Sam attracted the

attention of Y Combinator's founder Paul

Graham. Paul had a lot of business

experience and became a mentor to Sam as

the two got on extremely well. However,

Paul also observed something curious

about Sam. He said, "Sam is extremely

good at becoming powerful. You could

parachute him into an island full of

cannibals and come back in 5 years and

he'd be the king. Interestingly, before

long, Sam ended up becoming president of

Y Combinator. This meant at just 30

years old, Sam Alman was now leading the

most prestigious startup accelerator,

which allowed him to build relationships

with many of Silicon Valley's most

influential entrepreneurs.

Sam became extremely wellconed and his

reputation in the tech world grew

massively.

Sam soon began doing more public

speeches and one of his favorite topics

to discuss was artificial intelligence.

In 2015, Elon Musk was terrified.

He was concerned about the lack of

safety precautions around AI which he

felt posed an existential threat to

humanity. I

>> I don't think most people understand

just how quickly machine intelligence is

advancing.

>> I try to convince people to slow down

slow down AI to regulate AI.

This was futile. At this point in 2015,

Google was the undisputed leader in

artificial intelligence.

They'd been acquiring AI research labs

and had roughly 3/4 of the top AI talent

working for them. And yet, when Elon

spoke with Google's CEO at the time,

Larry Page, Larry didn't seem all that

worried about AI.

Elon asked him how he could be so sure

super intelligence wouldn't wipe out

humanity, but Larry dismissed it

completely, saying Elon was being way

too paranoid.

But Elon said that Google had a monopoly

on AI and that the person in charge

doesn't care about AI safety. just one

one company that has close to monopoly

on AI talent and uh and computers like

or scaled computing and the person who's

in in charge doesn't seem to care about

safety. This is not good.

>> So Elon desperately felt he needed to

dilute Google's power and that would

lead him to a partnership with a man

named Sam Olman.

In 2015, 10 influential people in the

tech world met for dinner. Elon Musk and

Sam Alman were both there. So was Greg

Brockman, who'd been influential in

growing Stripe. and also Ilaskea who was

one of the most respected researchers in

AI. At the dinner they all talked very

seriously about artificial intelligence

and its potential consequences and they

discussed how they could build an AI

company together to rival Google. Elon

said he would put forward a billion

dollars of funding. And so they figured

with Elon's investment money, Greg's

business operation experience, Ilia's AI

skills, and Sam to orchestrate

everything, they would have the dream

team. And thus, Open AAI was founded in

2015 as a nonprofit organization.

The reason was that they said having a

profit motivation with a technology like

this could be very dangerous and instead

it should be built for the good of the

world.

What's the the furthest thing from

Google would be like a nonprofit uh that

is fully open cuz Google was closed uh

for profit. So that's why the open and

open AAI refers to open source. We don't

want this to be sort of a profit

maximizing demon from hell.

>> In their own words, open AI's objective

was to build AI safely for the benefit

of humanity and they would share their

work openly with the public for free

instead of keeping it private for their

own gain. Hence the name open AI.

However,

very soon that would all change.

When OpenAI began in 2015, it did not

look like a world-changing company. They

didn't even have an office. It was just

a small group working from Greg

Brockman's apartment.

We're sitting essentially on a couch at

a kitchen counter and on a bed and

that's pretty much it. That's where the

work is getting done. Um it's it's kind

of crazy to think that, you know, that's

where something this big got started.

However, they had over a billion dollars

pledged from various investors, and this

funding meant they could attract top AI

researchers very quickly, and so they

began by just experimenting.

Unfortunately, they didn't really have a

clear strategy. They spent a lot of

their time building a bot that could

play the popular game Dota 2. They

figured if they could build an AI that

understood the complexity of the game

world, it could lead to an AI that

better understood our world. Then

another project they did involved trying

to build a robot butler. One of OpenAI's

early employees even admitted, "We were

just doing random stuff and seeing what

would happen." Now, it's worth noting

that at this point, neither Sam nor Elon

was around much. Sam was still running Y

Combinator, and Elon had his other

businesses. Instead, OpenAI was led by

Ilia, who was considered to be an AI

genius, and Greg, who was considered an

expert at managing business operations.

But what the whole team did have was a

shared vision of creating AGI,

artificial general intelligence.

There are different definitions of this,

but it often means artificial

intelligence that can match or surpass

human capabilities at most tasks.

But here's the key. AGI should be able

to acquire new skills it wasn't even

trained on. Which is why some

researchers say the first super

intelligent machine is the last

invention humanity needs. Because if we

can build a machine smarter than us,

that can build even better machines

beyond what humans can even think of. So

inside OpenAI, the employees talked

about AGI as though they were building

God. Even in the very early days, the

OpenAI team were talking about how they

wanted to build something that could

completely change the world. Because AI

will solve all the problems that we have

today. It will solve employment. It will

solve disease.

It will solve poverty.

But it will also create new problems.

The problem of fake news is going to be

a million times worse.

cyber attacks will become much more

extreme. We will have totally automated

AI weapons.

>> Many of the Open AI team shared a

similar feeling that what they were

building had the potential to be the

greatest invention ever, but they also

said it could be the greatest threat to

the existence of humanity.

It's not that it's going to actively

hate humans and want to harm them, but

it's just going to be too powerful. And

I think a good analogy would be the way

humans treat animals.

It's not that we hate animals, but when

the time comes to build a highway

between two cities,

we are not asking the animals for

permission.

A very simple example would be if we did

create super intelligence and asked it

to help Earth, there could be unintended

consequences like the AI deciding the

planet would be a lot safer without

humans.

Sam Alman was saying similar things too.

On the one hand, he would publicly say

that with AI, we can cure all human

disease. We can build new realities. And

then he would also say if this

technology goes wrong, it can go quite

wrong. I think AI will probably like

most likely sort of lead to the end of

the world, but in the meantime, uh,

there will be great companies.

>> What's kind of funny is that they were

saying this stuff back when they were

making AI bots for video games. So, most

people didn't take them too seriously

back then. In fact, many felt the idea

of AI becoming powerful enough to

threaten humans was laughable, as at

this point, AI still felt quite

primitive.

The cynical explanation was that the

OpenAI team were talking about AI saving

humanity or wiping out the human race

because it helped attract publicity and

investors.

But it does seem most of them genuinely

believed what they were saying about the

potential power of this technology. And

they weren't the only ones. Vladimir

Putin infamously said, "Whoever wins the

AI race will be the ruler of the world.

Back in 2015 when OpenAI began, the

reason most people weren't paying much

attention to AI was that the field of

artificial intelligence had seen decades

of slow progress. It had been dubbed the

AI winter as after a lot of initial

hype, there hadd been a lot less

breakthroughs than expected and so

funding dried up and many researchers

moved on. But in 2015, the same year

OpenAI began. For the first time, an AI

program beat a professional Go player,

which is a complex strategy game. And

the AI would later go on to beat the

world's best human player. This was

exciting news, but it also illustrated

the problem with current AI technology.

That AI could only play Go and nothing

else. Which meant if you wanted the AI

to do any other task like write a story

or calculate an equation, you'd have to

build and train a whole new system for

that one task, which was extremely

timeconuming. This was largely because

the training data you fed the AI had to

be clearly labeled to explain what it

was.

The TV show Silicon Valley parodyied

this perfectly. If you trained an AI on

enough specific data, an AI could tell

if an image was a hot dog or not a hot

dog, but it had no concept of anything

else. Basically, machines could do one

thing well if trained, but it was very

narrowly focused. Whereas human brains

were special because they could do so

many different things, which was dubbed

general intelligence.

However, in 2017, a team of scientists

working at Google published a paper that

would change everything.

A small team of engineers at Google

published a paper called attention is

all you need and they put forward a new

type of AI architecture known as the

transformer.

Unlike previous AI systems that needed

to be fed highly specific data that was

all labeled clearly to explain what the

data was, like hot dog or not hot dog,

the transformer was different. It could

take in random, messy, unlabeled data

and essentially teach itself. and it

worked surprisingly well. What's

interesting is that it was engineers at

Google, not OpenAI, who made this

initial breakthrough with the

Transformer. But Google had become so

big that they were very slow and

cautious. So even though they developed

their own AI chatbot before OpenAI, they

didn't release it to the public. They

worried it could make outlandish

comments that hurt Google's reputation

and opened up legal and regulatory

risks. Most crucially, Google worried it

could hurt their search advertising

business, which funded everything Google

did.

In hindsight, Google's decision to move

so slowly, turned out to be a grave

mistake, as they left the door open for

OpenAI to capitalize on Google's

invention instead.

Ilia read this research paper about the

transformer and immediately saw its

potential. As a result, OpenAI became

one of the first companies to seriously

start experimenting with this

technology. That's where the famous GPT

acronym comes from, generative

pre-trained transformer.

The transformer could handle far more

data and process human language much

faster. Most importantly, it could

handle pretty much any query, meaning

they were more general.

So thanks to the transformer, open AAI

suddenly started making huge progress

very quickly.

Now you may wonder why didn't the AI

researchers in the 20th century come up

with this? Well, they were limited by a

lack of compute power and the lack of

the internet.

You see, even though this wasn't the

internet's purpose, the internet had

become the perfect training data for an

AI because basically every book and

article had become digitized and humans

create endless amounts of content. And

so basically everything humans had ever

written online could now be fed into

these AI models as training data for

neural networks.

It's been described as a black box as we

don't fully know how they do what they

do. we just add input and receive

output.

But all of this meant that instead of

the old AI models that have been trained

to do one specific task, these new AI

transformer models became extremely

broad and general. They'd basically been

trained on all text available, so you

could ask it anything. However, this

method of just scraping the internet as

training data raises obvious copyright

concerns. But the Silicon Valley ethos

has always been to ask forgiveness, not

permission.

OpenAI knew if they started asking big

companies if they could scrape all their

data, of course, there'd be lots of push

back and discussions about royalties.

So, OpenAI just went and did it. And it

worked so well that by the time Open AI

got to their GPT tomb language model,

they started to become worried.

They feared that what they were building

was so powerful that if they freely

shared the open- source code for it like

they'd promised all along in the wrong

hands, this could become very dangerous.

So, OpenAI announced due to our concerns

about malicious applications of the

technology, we are not releasing the

trained GPT2 model. This actually helped

generate a huge amount of publicity and

hype for them. For example, Wired

magazine published an article called the

AI text generator that's too dangerous

to make public. Open AAI also didn't

disclose what data sets had been used to

train it. It started to become clear

that OpenAI maybe didn't want to be so

open after all.

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[Music]

In 2018, Elon announced he was resigning

from OpenAI's board of directors.

publicly. They said this was due to a

conflict of interests as he was CEO of

Tesla which was developing its own AI.

But the truth was very different. Elon

had wanted to take over OpenAI and

become the CEO. He also proposed OpenAI

becoming part of Tesla, but the board

had refused and that's why he was now

leaving. Unfortunately for OpenAI, this

meant he was also taking his investment

money with him. He had pledged $1

billion in total, but it's believed less

than a hundred million had been paid so

far, and now OpenAI wouldn't be getting

the rest. This left OpenAI with a huge

funding problem. And so many employees

were extremely worried about what this

meant for the future of the business.

And this is where OpenAI made a very

controversial decision. In order to

increase their ability to raise more

capital and attract investors, OpenAI

decided to switch from being a nonprofit

to a for-profit business instead. They

also announced they'd be licensing their

technology for commercial use. Now, it's

important to note that there's obviously

nothing inherently wrong with being a

company that makes a profit. And Sam

argued this was necessary to raise more

investment. Plus, they said the profit

investors could make was counted 100

times the investment they made. However,

many felt this was a complete betrayal

of the whole reason they'd started the

company. Not just that, but OpenAI soon

formed a partnership with Microsoft, who

agreed to invest a billion dollars.

Microsoft had lots of raw computing

power, which OpenAI needed. So, the deal

made sense for both sides. But OpenAI's

mission had been to provide an

alternative to big tech. And now they

were going to help one of the world's

most powerful tech companies become more

powerful.

So many would argue Open AAI had

completely backtracked on its mission

for democratizing AI. Remember the name

Open AI was chosen as it was meant to be

open- source and freely owned by the

world. And yet, as soon as they had an

actually powerful product, they didn't

want to be open. They instead would

become increasingly secretive. Elon

would later sue the company, demanding

they change their name from Open AI to

closed AI. After transitioning to a

for-profit company, they also now needed

an official CEO, and it was Sam Olman

who got the role. Suddenly, Paul

Graham's comments about Sam being good

at getting into positions of power seems

more relevant than ever.

In 2020, OpenAI unveiled GPT3, a

language model trained on massive

internet data sets. But the real

groundbreaking moment was on the 30th of

November, 2022, when OpenAI publicly

released its chatbot, ChatGpt.

At this point, most of the general

public had never heard of OpenAI, so

there was no big fanfare. It started

with Sam making a simple tweet saying,

"Today we launched Chat GPT. Try talking

with it here." What's interesting is

that OpenAI's leadership said this was

just a low-key research preview. And so,

expectations were low. Employees took

bets on how many users they'd get in the

first week, and the highest guess was

100,000 users. In reality, they were

completely wrong. Chat GPT went viral

and rapidly captured the attention of

the world. In just 2 months, it became

the fastest app to reach 100 million

users. For context, it had taken

Facebook 4 and 1/2 years to hit the same

milestone.

This unexpected growth was of course

very exciting for OpenAI. But what's

interesting is that internally at the

company, there had been some employees

uncomfortable releasing chat GPT so

quickly, and some of the safety team

weren't even aware it was going to be

released. They argued that they didn't

know how it might be misused by the

public. There were obvious risks like

hackers using it to find vulnerabilities

in code or people using it to help them

commit crimes, but there was no way of

knowing quite what would happen when the

general public started interacting with

chat GPT. Plus, the team were aware it

made a lot of factual errors which were

dubbed hallucinations.

Still, despite concerns, Chat GPT went

live and the response from the public

was extremely positive. Everyone had

tried chat bots before, but they always

felt extremely robotic. If you didn't

ask your question in the right way, they

were useless as they were basically

giving pre-programmed answers. But chat

GPT felt much more knowledgeable and

conversational. Within a couple of

months of ChatGpt being released,

Microsoft increased its ownership stake

in OpenAI with a new $10 billion

investment.

Chat GPT's release also caused the AI

race to really ramp up. Investors began

throwing more money at AI projects than

ever before, and the big tech companies

all scrambled to release their own AI

models to compete. Open AAI seemed to be

leading though. They continued to

release new products and became even

more commercialized with paid plans and

selling their underlying technology to

businesses.

However, at OpenAI, a divide was growing

between those focused on product versus

those focused on safety.

OpenAI star engineer Ilaskea seemed to

grow concerned and began working more

closely with the company's safety team.

Then a group of nine current and former

OpenAI employees accused the company of

prioritizing profits over safety and

said OpenAI used restrictive agreements

to silent safety concerns. One of their

key safety researchers quit for the same

reason. Meanwhile, several of OpenAI's

lead developers left to start a rival

company called Anthropic with the goal

to build a safer AI alternative.

But these internal conflicts didn't seem

to slow OpenAI down. Not only was

ChatGPT taking the world by storm, but

OpenAI's progress with Dari, their image

generator, and Sora, their video

generator, were also incredible

developments.

In fact, Sam's vision of what AI could

achieve only seemed to get bigger. He

was publicly talking about how what

they're building would create a world of

abundance and could help end poverty and

disease. At a major gathering of world

leaders, Sam said, "I think this will be

the most transformative and beneficial

technology humanity has yet invented."

He went on to say how there is nothing

else he would rather be working on. But

then came one of the most shocking

twists in recent business history. Less

than 24 hours after giving that speech,

Sam Olman was fired.

Sam Alman got a text from Ilia asking

him to join a video call. Sam wasn't

sure what it was about and so he was

very surprised to find that the OpenAI

board was on the call except for his

friend Greg Brockman. The board told Sam

they were firing him. The call ended

shortly after and Sam was locked out of

his OpenAI computer.

It's hard to overstate what a shock this

was to everyone, including Sam. He was

the face of OpenAI, one of the most

exciting companies in the world. And now

he was being kicked out. It was Friday,

November 17th, 2023, when Sam was told

the news. and the OpenAI board put out a

statement saying they had removed

co-founder Sam Alman as CEO.

The board's statement explained that Sam

was not consistently candid with his

communications with the board, basically

implying Sam had lied to them and they

couldn't trust him. The board then said

they no longer had confidence in Alman's

ability to continue leading OpenAI.

It was all kind of vague. So, pretty

much everyone was asking what really

happened here. And there were many

different theories about why he'd been

fired. The board's main accusation was

that Sam had a habit of outright lying

to them, and so they often felt they

couldn't trust what he said. For

example, Sam said things had been

approved by their internal safety board,

which actually hadn't been approved.

It's also believed Sam had fallen out

with one of the board members, Helen

Toner, after she published a paper where

she basically suggested their

competitor, Anthropic, was safer than

Chat GPT. Apparently, Sam had taken

issue with that and had tried to get

Helen kicked off the board. He

reportedly told the other board members

that everyone else agreed Helen should

be fired, even though they hadn't said

that. The board members began to feel

that he was playing them against each

other.

Another theory about why the OpenAI

board turned on Sam is that they had

become annoyed that Sam seemed to be

building a whole empire of different

projects outside of OpenAI.

The board felt this was a major

distraction. For example, Sam had been

trying to raise tens of billions of

dollars from the Middle East to fund an

AI chipmaking business. He'd also

started a project called Worldcoin, a

crypto-based network that would give

everyone worldwide a unique digital

identity by scanning their eyes. Sam

believed that AI may put huge amounts of

people out of work, and thus they'd need

a way to distribute a universal basic

income. But some people think the Ford

was concerned about how Sam wanted to

use OpenAI's technology for all his own

separate projects.

However, there's also another very

prominent theory about why the board

really turned on Sam, and it's the most

concerning one. Some believe that the

reason I turned on Sam was because he

saw something internally that made him

worried.

Ilia had been heavily involved in safety

at OpenAI. And for him to suddenly flip

on his co-founder was concerning. It

became a meme on social media with

people asking, "What did I see?

Still, no matter the exact reasons the

board had, the fact was that on Friday,

November 17th, Sam was kicked out of

OpenAI, and it was announced they'd

begin looking for a new CEO.

But by Saturday, something very

unexpected started happening. Open AAI

employees began revoling against the

board. It began when co-founder Greg

Brockman resigned from the company in

solidarity with Sam. But over the

weekend, more and more OpenAI employees

came forward in support of Sam. A letter

was drafted by OpenAI staff saying they

disagreed with the board's decision to

fire Sam, and they complained the board

hadn't given adequate explanation of

why. A petition was then created by

employees to say that they would leave

the company if Sam wasn't brought back.

And nearly all of the company's 800

employees signed it to say they didn't

want to work there unless Sam and Greg

were brought back.

Social media became flooded with posts

from employees saying OpenAI is nothing

without its people. Sam was replying to

each one individually with heart emojis.

Now, it's worth noting that part of this

support probably wasn't just out of

loyalty. You see, right before this coup

happened, OpenAI had been planning a

share sale for employees, which would

mean a big cash payout for staff. But

all this chaos going on would have

probably destroyed the chances of that

happening and massively hurt OpenAI's

valuation.

So keeping Sam in place was probably in

the employees best financial interests.

But either way, the OpenAI board

basically had a mass mutiny on its

hands. They had never expected the staff

to be so loyal to Sam. And to make

matters worse for them, Microsoft

announced Sam and Greg would join them

instead and that they would hire any

OpenAI employees who wanted to leave. At

first, the board still tried to press on

with their plan and began lining up a

new CEO to replace Sam. But then on

Monday morning came the final dagger.

Ilia, one of the four board members who

had initially pushed Sam out, changed

his mind and signed a petition saying he

wanted Sam to stay.

Ilia tweeted, "I deeply regret my

participation in the board's actions. I

never intended to harm OpenAI. I will do

everything I can to reunite the

company."

Now, it's unclear if he genuinely felt

that way or he had just realized that

all the other employees were clearly

siding with Sam, but Ilia siding with

Sam was the point that the remaining

board members realized they had lost the

battle. If you come for the king, you

best not miss. And the board had missed.

By Monday, negotiations were ongoing to

bring Sam back. And all of a sudden, the

board had lost all of its leverage, and

Sam was the one in the position of

power. The dynamics had totally flipped,

and Sam now held all the cards. By

Tuesday, a deal was reached. The board

members who turned on Sam would be

kicked off the board, and new board

members would be brought in. Sam would

return as CEO, and Greg would come back,

too. Greg posted saying, "We are so

back." And they held a companywide party

at the office. It truly was a party

atmosphere. What's really crazy is that

all of this happened in just 5 days. On

Friday, Sam was ambushed and thrown out.

By Tuesday, he was back as CEO, his

enemies on the board all gone, and the

entire company had declared loyalty to

him. Not just that, Sam would be

involved in choosing the new board

members, meaning he was in a stronger

position than ever before. And the odds

of anyone challenging him again now

seemed extremely low. As for Ilia, he

lost his board seat and ended up leaving

OpenAI completely just 6 months later.

However, what's really fascinating about

all this is that before the board tried

to overthrow Sam, he had repeatedly

talked about how it was only fair that

the board should be able to fire him and

hold him accountable. The board can fire

me. I think that's important.

>> Sam had repeated this a lot. And yet,

when the board members did try to fire

him, it turns out they couldn't.

Hey, how's it going?

>> Hey there, it's going great. How about

you? I see you're rocking an open AI

hoodie. Nice choice.

>> The introduction of chat GPT's voice

mode marked another step towards science

fiction.

you could now have a very realistic

sounding conversation with an AI.

People immediately saw the parallels

with the 2013 film called Her about a

man falling in love with an AI. The

concept sounded kind of absurd at the

time, but now it's easier than ever to

see how it could happen. People are

already using Chat GPT as a friend, an

assistant, or even a therapist. So, it's

inevitable some people will use it as a

partner that they can program however

they want with the specific

characteristics they desire.

Interestingly, even though the film her

was quite dystopian, it seems Sam may

have been inspired by it. He

specifically reached out to Scarlett

Johansson, who did the AI voice in the

movie, to see if she wanted to be a

voice for Chat GPT. She declined, but

OpenAI went ahead and made a voice that

sounded like her anyway, leading her to

sue the company. But her own friends and

family thought it was her. Sam denied

the voice was based on Scarlet's voice

in the movie Her, but it didn't help his

case that he literally tweeted the word

her right after the feature was

released.

Still, despite all the controversy

around Open AI, there's no denying that

what they're building is exciting,

especially given how quickly the

technology is progressing. And that's

what makes the future of AI so hard to

predict.

A few years ago, it was widely believed

that AI would come for manual jobs first

and creative jobs would be the last to

go. As surely, machines can't be

creative. Turns out though, it's the

creative industries AI is disrupting

first. Likewise, a few years ago, it was

hard to imagine anyone disrupting

Google's dominance in search. But now,

many people ask their questions to chat

GPT instead.

The reality is every industry is likely

to be disrupted by AI in some way. Many

will use it as a tool to help them. Many

will get replaced.

And if you want an example of how fast

AI is progressing, here's the real

twist. This entire video was created by

AI.

[Music]

Nah, I'm just kidding. None of this was

AI. For the record, not a single line in

any Magnates Media video has ever been

written by AI. These videos take a long

time to make because I research and

write the scripts, record the voice

over, and then we spend hundreds of

hours editing them. But the fact you

can't always tell on YouTube anymore is

kind of crazy.

It was already hard to trust what you

see online. But as it becomes easier

than ever to create images, videos, and

audio of people saying and doing

whatever you want, it'll be harder than

ever to trust news or even trust that

who you're speaking with is human.

Social media is already filled with AI

accounts.

What's perhaps most interesting, though,

is how AI will mix with other

technology. As tech like virtual reality

improves, we'll probably get to a point

where people essentially spend more time

in a virtual world than the real world.

Kind of like Ready Player One. Imagine

being able to enter an ultra realistic

world indistinguishable from reality,

but you can go wherever you want, be

whoever you want, and do whatever you

want. It's not hard to see how someone

who's unhappy with their real life would

want to switch to a virtual world

powered by AI that can generate whatever

they desire. and it'll feel real.

Unless, of course, we're already inside

that world right now.

So, where are we up to? As of 2025,

OpenAI had closed a new funding round of

$40 billion at a $30 billion valuation,

making it the largest private tech

funding round in history. Meanwhile,

Elon Musk and Sam Alman, who started as

co-founders, are now competitors. They

continue to publicly argue, throwing

insults back and forth.

However, in January 2025, all the

American tech companies got shaken by

the arrival of Deepseek, a Chinese AI

competitor. Hundreds of billions of

dollars were wiped off the market caps

of US AI stocks as it became clear China

was a serious player in the AI race.

Open AAI actually accused DeepSeek of

stealing its intellectual property,

which a lot of people mocked since you

could argue Open AI essentially stole

that intellectual property in the first

place by scraping the internet. But

either way, what is clear is that the AI

race is heating up. And whilst nobody

knows for sure how it will play out,

it's fair to say the results will impact

us all.

Now, OpenAI's latest funding round was

led by SoftBank. And if you want to see

what happened last time SoftBank pumped

tens of billions into a company, click

here to watch the story of the $47

billion cult. Trust me, it's a crazy

one. I'll see you there. Cheers.