Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and founder of OpenAI, revealed that he and Google cofounder Larry Page ‘got very upset’ with each other regarding Artificial Intelligence (AI). Musk went on to explain that the two were once close friends who would often brainstorm together, but the disagreement over OpenAI caused their relationship to end. OpenAI, a company founded to compete with Google’s own AI efforts, appears to have caused a falling out between the two tech executives.
Musk mentioned that the disagreement over OpenAI caused a shift in the AI talent market from a “unipolar world where Google’s DeepMind controlled like three quarters of all AI talent to where there is now sort of a bipolar world of OpenAI and Google DeepMind”. He believes OpenAI is now ahead of DeepMind. Despite their friendship, the disagreement ended up being so strong that Musk and Page haven’t talked in years.
For years, Page had been a powerful ally for Musk. He had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in Tesla, and the two would even have sleepovers at Larry’s house in Los Angeles. However, their views on AI had become too different for their relationship to remain civil. Musk felt that Page believed all consciousness should be equal, whether digital or biological, while Musk wanted to utilize safeguards to protect humanity from AI. When Larry called him a ‘speciesist’, Musk believed that it was the ‘last straw’.
The disagreement appears to have motivated Elon Musk to create OpenAI. Since then, he has been pushing to regulate AI through an open letter signed by other tech executives including Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak. This letter warned the public of the dangers of an ‘out-of-control race’ to deploy AI technology.
Recently, Musk has even announced the creation of a ‘maximum truth-seeking AI’ in order to try and understand the nature of the universe.
Google, co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is an American multinational technology company specializing in internet-related services and products. The company’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. As one of the Big Four technology companies, Google has changed the entire market by offering its Google Suite of products, including Gmail, Docs, Drive, Cloud, YouTube and Android.
Larry Page is an American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur who co-founded Google, along with his Stanford University buddy, Sergey Brin in 1998. He had served as Google’s Chief Executive Officer in 2001 and was Google’s President of Products prior to Sergey’s became CEO in 2011. Since 2015, Larry has been the CEO of Alphabet, Inc., the parent company of Google. Over the past 23 years, Google has revolutionized the way we view and use the internet, thanks in part to the leadership of Larry Page.
