&gt;<i>And yet Elon Musk is involved in this project. So are Sam Altman and Peter Thiel. So are a bunch of other people whom I know have read Bostrom, are deeply concerned about AI risk, and are pretty clued-in.</i><p>This is precisely what dumbfounded me about the announcement.<p>&gt;<i>My biggest hope is that as usual they are smarter than I am and know something I don’t.</i><p>It&#x27;s possible that OpenAI might be a play to attain a more accurate picture of what constitutes state-of-the-art in the field, effectively robbing the large tech companies of their advantage—all the while building a robust research organization that could potentially go dark if necessary.<p>Admittedly, that also sounds like it could be the plot to a Marvel movie. Perhaps a simpler explanation is that the details aren&#x27;t really hashed out yet, and they&#x27;re essentially going to figure it out as they go—which would be congruent with the gist of OpenAI&#x27;s launch interview.