What would our world look like without Elon Musk? For example, AI would likely not have progressed and exist in its current form:
Elon Musk…
- was an angel investor in DeepMind (2013)
- told Larry Page (Google) of DeepMind; who then acquired them in 2014
- Then he co-founded OpenAI (with ±$40mn) in 2015 to prevent Google from having a monopoly
- Then started xAI after OpenAI released ChatGPT which kicked off the current AI boom
His funding enabled researchers at OpenAI and DeepMind; of which many key employees left to start:
1. Anthropic (Dario Amodei, former VP of Research and Daniela Amodei, former VP of Safety)
2. Perplexity (Aravind Srinivas, early OpenAI researcher)
3. Adept AI (David Luan, former VP of Engineering) then acquired by Amazon
4. SSI (Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder)
5. Mistral AI (by former DeepMind researchers)
6. Inflection AI (Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind co-founder) then acquired by Microsoft
and more.
In other words, hadn’t Elon Musk funded the very early LLM ventures, DeepMind would not have existed in its current form, OpenAI would not exist in its current form, and because of that, many other AI companies such as Anthropics likely wouldn’t exist. And – through acquisitions – Google, Microsoft, and Amazon wouldn’t have any competitive AI teams
Like him or hate him, Elon Musk directly and indirectly helped create the AI / LLM progress we’re living through right now (even if partly just via early venture capital).