In 2016, Jack Clark walked up to me in Bloomberg’s San Francisco newsroom and asked if we could go for a walk. As an editor, it’s often not good when one of your reporters makes a request like this.
Sure enough, as we sat on a bench looking over the bay, Jack told me he was quitting to join a nonprofit called OpenAI.
I said this was a terrible idea. OpenAI was less than a year old at the time and was still a relatively obscure AI research group. Its major claim to fame was Elon Musk‘s (uneven) financial support.
I pressed my case. As a reporter on Bloomberg’s Big Tech team, Jack had a pretty stable job. In contrast, OpenAI didn’t seem to have much of a direction, and I couldn’t see a path for it to become financially sustainable beyond asking Musk for more money. I selfishly also wanted Jack …