OpenAI’s 2017 plan to auction AGI to China and Russia, per The Atlantic

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In 2017, OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever proposed auctioning the rights to the company’s future AGI to governments, including the US, China and Russia. Kevin Roose reports the plan in an excerpt from his book, published by The Atlantic on Tuesday. Dario Amodei opposed it. It was one of several disputes that led him to leave and found Anthropic, Roose writes.

The excerpt, published in The Atlantic, comes from Roose’s forthcoming book, The AGI Chronicles. Five people familiar with the plan described it to him.

The ‘countries plan’

The idea came as Elon Musk was pulling away from OpenAI and the lab needed new funding, Roose writes. It began as a proposal for an international coalition to manage the risks of AGI. By the time Brockman and Sutskever presented it to staff that winter, it had become a fundraising strategy known internally as the “countries plan”.

Two...

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