THE ROLE MODELS
Episode art: The Nonprofit Paradox
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The Role Models · Season One · Episode 3 · 41 min

The Nonprofit Paradox

A bot beats a Dota 2 world champion in front of a packed arena, and the cost of staying in the race starts doubling every few months. A lab that set out to give its research away discovers what it actually costs to build AGI, and Musk sends an email about "the triggering event."

0:00 / 40:35

Disclaimer: a dramatization based on public records, including court filings, published emails and company posts. Some scenes and dialogue are reconstructed or composited. Voices are AI-generated and perform words from the public record; they are not intended to resemble any real person. Not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAI or any person depicted. Allegations in court filings are unproven claims.

Chapters

The Role Models, S01E03: "The Nonprofit Paradox"

Runtime: 40:35 · Season One · A Will Sigmon Media production Season / Episode: 1 / 3 · episodeType: full

Cold open

Seattle. August 11th, 2017. KeyArena, home this week of The International, the world championship of a video game called Dota 2. A packed arena, and a huge audience watching online. But tonight's surprise isn't a team. It's a showmatch. One on one. On one side is Danylo Ishutin, "Dendi," Ukrainian, a former world champion, maybe the most beloved player the game has ever had. He walks out to cheering. On the other side there's no one. Just a computer and a program that…

About this episode

A bot beats a Dota 2 world champion in front of a packed arena, and the cost of staying in the race starts doubling every few months. A lab that set out to give its research away discovers what it actually costs to build AGI, and Musk sends an email about "the triggering event."

Disclaimer: a dramatization based on public records, including court filings, published emails and company posts. Some scenes and dialogue are reconstructed or composited. Voices are AI-generated and perform words from the public record; they are not intended to resemble any real person. Not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAI or any person depicted. Allegations in court filings are unproven claims.

Beat outline / chapters

  • 0:00 KeyArena
  • 4:01 The Gym
  • 11:05 Sixty for Ten
  • 15:18 The Particle Accelerator
  • 25:58 Something Out of Nothing
  • 33:29 The Triggering Event

Key people

  • Elon Musk
  • Sam Altman
  • Ilya Sutskever
  • Greg Brockman

How we tell it

  • Every line a character speaks in their own voice is verbatim from the public record: emails, an iMessage, tweets, interviews, a stage moment, a blog statement. We invent no dialogue for any real person. Written shorthand is read out in words ("MSFT" as Microsoft, "1v1" as one-v-one).
  • There are no dramatized scenes with dialogue this episode. The arena at The International is sound design around documented facts: the date, the venue, the format, the result, Dendi's concession, and Brockman's two-week training explanation.
  • What Musk meant by "the triggering event" is left open. The email doesn't say, and the next day's call isn't in the public record. We connect it only to the documented summer-2017 for-profit threads.
  • "Non-profit was def the right one early on" is Brockman's report of Musk's view, in a text to Shivon Zilis, not Musk's own words.
  • Musk's September 2016 reply about Microsoft is paraphrased, not quoted, because of its language. Google Brain's "100k GPUs" is OpenAI's own estimate in Sutskever's email.
  • Karpathy's move to Tesla is stated as fact; the conflict-of-interest question is left for Episode Four, where both founders' accounts are told side by side.
  • Voices are AI-generated and perform words from the public record; they are not intended to resemble any real person.

Sources

  • The 2016–2017 emails and messages (Musk's April 2016 NYT statement; the September 2016 "MSFT hosting deal" thread and Sam Teller's follow-up; Sutskever's June 12 and July 20, 2017 bi-weekly updates and his July 12, 2017 "The business of building AGI"; Musk's June 13 and July 21 replies; Brockman's July 13 iMessage and July 21 three-step path; Musk's August 11, 2017 "triggering event" email): Musk v. Altman court exhibits and OpenAI's blog releases, compiled in [OpenAI Email Archives (LessWrong)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5jjk4CDnj9tA7ugxr).
  • OpenAI Gym public beta, April 27, 2016: [openai.com](https://openai.com/index/openai-gym-beta/).
  • Cade Metz, "Inside OpenAI, Elon Musk's Wild Plan to Set Artificial Intelligence Free," [Wired, April 27, 2016](https://www.wired.com/2016/04/openai-elon-musk-sam-altman-plan-to-set-artificial-intelligence-free/): Yann LeCun's quote.
  • Amodei, Olah, Steinhardt, Christiano, Schulman, Mané, "Concrete Problems in AI Safety," [arXiv:1606.06565](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.06565), June 2016.
  • Universe, December 5, 2016: [openai.com](https://openai.com/index/universe/).
  • OpenAI's 2016 and 2017 tax filings (Abbeel's $425,000; ~52 people and ~$11M in 2016; $7.9M on cloud computing in 2017), via the New York Times, TechCrunch and Reuters; [TechCrunch, May 17, 2023](https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/17/elon-musk-used-to-say-he-put-100m-in-openai-but-now-its-50m-here-are-the-receipts/).
  • DeepMind's 2016 UK accounts (about 400 employees, $138M total costs), as reported at the time.
  • "OpenAI and Elon Musk," [openai.com, March 5, 2024](https://openai.com/index/openai-elon-musk/): "In early 2017, we came to the realization…"
  • Dario Amodei and Danny Hernandez, "AI and Compute," [openai.com, May 2018](https://openai.com/index/ai-and-compute/): the 3.5-month doubling and 300,000x since 2012.
  • The International 2017 1v1 showmatch (KeyArena, Seattle, August 11, 2017): OpenAI's [Dota 2 post](https://openai.com/index/dota-2/); contemporaneous coverage in Inverse, MCV and The Flying Courier. Jakub Pachocki's quote: TechCrunch, August 2017.
  • Musk's tweets, August 12, 2017 ("first ever to defeat world's best players in competitive eSports"; "Vastly more risk than North Korea").
  • Andrej Karpathy joins Tesla as Director of AI, June 2017.
  • OpenAI Five beats OG, April 13, 2019: [openai.com](https://openai.com/index/openai-five-defeats-dota-2-world-champions/).
  • Tay, Microsoft's Twitter chatbot, March 2016.

Cast

  • Narrator: Nathaniel C
  • Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Sam Teller, Yann LeCun, Jakub Pachocki, Dendi, and a document reader: original designed character voices (ElevenLabs), reading verbatim quotes

Credits

Written and produced by Will Sigmon for Will Sigmon Media. Narrator and character voices: AI-generated voices performing words from the public record.

Listen next

Next: Episode 4, "The Divorce."

Episode page: https://shows.willsigmon.media/role-models/episodes/s01e03

Disclaimer: a dramatization based on public records, including court filings, published emails and company posts. Some scenes and dialogue are reconstructed or composited. Voices are AI-generated and perform words from the public record; they are not intended to resemble any real person. Not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAI or any person depicted. Allegations in court filings are unproven claims. The Role Models is produced by Will Sigmon Media with AI-generated voices. Quoted emails, posts and filings are read verbatim and attributed; where the parties disagree, both accounts are given, and a company's post written during a lawsuit is treated as advocacy by one side. Sources for each episode are listed in its show notes.

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