How A Breakout Clip On One Private Jet Flight Lit The Fuse — Google Bought DeepMind, Musk Built OpenAI

The plan for the U.K. leaving the E.U. was hatched at the Chicago O’Hare Pizzaria Uno. Jon Ostrower is known for the saying that “there’s an aviation angle to everything.” And so it is with AI, too. The modern revolution in AI, and the corporate divisions, stem from a single private jet flight in 2013.

Elon Musk and PayPal co-founder Luke Nosek were traveling with Google co-founder Larry Page.

Everyone was starting at an update from Demis Hassabis of DeepMind about a reinforcement-learning breakthrough, where an agent learned Atari Breakout and discovered the “tunnel” strategy (getting the ball behind the bricks so it ricochets up top and clears fast).

Page saw the clip, heard the explanation and wanted to know what is this company? DeepMind stopped being a niche “interesting London lab” and became a must-own asset for Google. That flight was the attention catalyst, trigger a downstream sequence:

• Google’s acquisition of DeepMind was announced in January 2014, with a reported price of $400 – $500 million, and turning DeepMind into a “Manhattan Project” on AI inside the company.

• Reportedly, Facebook tried to buy DeepMind for $800 million, and Musk offered as much as 5% of Tesla, but Page beat them by letting the DeepMind team stay in London.

• Musk didn’t want the future of AI in Google’s hands. Losing DeepMind triggered the founding of OpenAI.

• OpenAI’s early “statement” hire was Ilya Sutskever from Google. Sutskever was key behind turning neural nets into a way to scale AI training and made deep learning the approach across vision, speech, and later language. He was also the developer of the general recipe for machines reading and producing language, which is a key precursor to today’s LLMs. This killed Musk’s relationship with Page.

• That ‘seq2seq’ work yielded the transformer three years later – at Google – which they failed to productize and monetize. They had the lead in AI by far but squandered it.

• Musk’s relationship with Google’s other co-founder was reportedly destroyed by sleeping with Brin’s wife, who went on to serve as RFK, Jr.’s vice presidential running mate and primary campaign funder. Brin returned to Google to lead AI efforts, creating a war-time posture and turning AI into an existential-priority.

• Musk lost control of OpenAI and created Grok, which was able to train on Twitter data, ultimately turning that from a dog investment into something highly profitable for him to have undertaken.

It was that private jet flight that turbocharged Google in AI, split Google’s co-founder from Elon Musk, led to the creation of OpenAI – and, ultimately, Grok as well.