I thought it was a workaround to Google's complete disinterest in productizing the AI research it was doing and publishing, rather than a way to balance their dominance in a market which didn't meaningfully exist.
That’s how it turned out, but IIRC at the time of OpenAI’s founding, “AI” was search and RL which Google and deep mind were dominating, and self driving, which Waymo was leading. And OpenAI was conceptualized as a research org to compete. A lot has changed and OpenAI has been good at seeing around those corners.
That was actually Character.ai's founding story. Two researchers at Google that were frustrated by a lack of resources and the inability to launch an LLM based chatbot. The founders are now back at Google. OpenAI was founded based on fears that Google would completely own AI in the future.
I think that Google didn't see the business case in that generation of models, and also saw significant safety concerns. If AI had been delayed by... 5 years... would the world really be a worse place?
Elon Musk specifically gave OAI $150M early on because of the risk of Google being the only Corp that has AGI or super-intelligence. These emails were part of the record in the lawsuit.
