OpenAI reportedly weighed China and Russia funding, plus a Kanye West GPT-3 preview

Before it became the most talked-about AI company on the planet, OpenAI was reportedly entertaining some very unusual business ideas. According to a new account of the company’s early years, leaders floated selling future AI tools to governments that included China and Russia. There was also a plan to give Kanye West early access to an unreleased model. Top staffers were reportedly horrified, and the reasons they gave still echo through the AI industry today. The story, reported by Kevin Roose in The Atlantic, matters because it helps explain one of the biggest splits in tech. Some of the people who pushed back hardest on these ideas later walked out and founded Anthropic, now one of OpenAI’s fiercest rivals. The “countries plan” and the Kanye pitch The central episode dates to 2017. OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever reportedly put forward an internal proposal known as the “countries plan.” The idea was to fund the race toward artificial general intelligence, or AGI, by bringing nation-states into the picture. Under the proposal, OpenAI could have auctioned off future AGI rights or taken money from governments. The countries mentioned included the US, China, and R...