AI Disagreement Causes Page to Ignore Musk
Elon Musk and Google co-founder Larry Page were friends for over a decade, often discussing late into the night at Page's home. However, they could not agree on artificial intelligence: Musk worries that machines could become smarter than humans and uncontrollable, leaving humanity unable to intervene.
Page believes that humans do not have to be the pinnacle of evolution. If machines are conscious and smarter, there is no reason to assume that humans deserve more protection. At a birthday party, the two argued, with Page calling Musk a speciesist. Musk admitted to prioritizing humanity, stating his love for humans.
Musk views this stance as a risk because Page controls Google's funding, computing power, and researchers. He attempted to block Google's acquisition of DeepMind but was unsuccessful. Subsequently, he co-founded OpenAI to create a force that values safety and can counterbalance Google. This turned the two friends into rivals.
The split was marked by recruitment efforts. Musk wanted to recruit Google researcher Ilya Sutskever to OpenAI, but Google tried to retain him. After several hesitations, Sutskever left. Musk believed this was necessary, while Page viewed it as a betrayal for a friend to start anew and take core talent, leading to their estrangement.
Musk later stated in an interview that he hopes to be friends with Larry again, noting they haven't seen each other in a long time. When asked if Page still ignores him, Musk's public response was affirmative. The above account comes from his interviews and biography, not from legal documents, and lacks Page's rebuttal records.
The buyer is OpenAI, which seeks a safe narrative and researchers, while the seller is Google, which lost Sutskever. The incident evolved from a disagreement between friends to a recruitment drive. Talent flowed from Google's AI projects to the new lab, benefiting OpenAI, which gained core researchers, while Page faced the pressure of losing both talent and an old friend.
Source: Public Information
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Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in 1998 and acquired DeepMind for about $500 million in 2014, integrating reinforcement learning and later AlphaGo into the company. At that time, Elon Musk was already in control of Tesla and SpaceX and had a close personal relationship with Page. Isaacson's biography records the speciesist argument at the birthday party and Musk's self-identification as a human prioritizer. After failing to block the acquisition, he co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with initial funding structured as a non-profit.
The capital path was to hedge against the computing power of an old friend with a new lab. OpenAI initially sought not product revenue but a group of researchers not on Google's payroll. Sutskever left Google Brain to become OpenAI's co-founder and chief scientist, being one of the most notable among this group. Google retained DeepMind and its own Brain team, while Musk later stepped back from daily management of OpenAI, but the recruitment had already been completed.
A comparable situation is the split between Robert Oppenheimer and the military over nuclear weapons control, as well as Zuckerberg recruiting Google deep learning talent to create his own lab. The current situation is not one of negotiation but rather a division that has become an industry: Google has DeepMind, OpenAI later pursued independent financing and investment from Microsoft, and Musk established xAI. The friendship has not been restored, and the companies now have their own models.
Structurally, this represents a division of control in technological replacement. Whoever controls a system stronger than humans gets to define whether humanity should be prioritized for protection. Page sees smarter machines as a potential next stage, while Musk views them as entities that must be guarded against. There is no court ruling on who betrayed whom, only the direction of researchers and the fact that they no longer communicate. The safety narrative evolved from a birthday argument to the rationale for establishing a lab.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
- Friends can fall out over the direction of a single researcher.
- If you can't block an acquisition, start another to hedge.
- Species prioritization is a stance; control of computing power defines the structure.