Musk, Altman,  Rosewood, Brockman resolved to build the AI lab they all envisioned

“It was one of those days where you could tell the chemistry was there,” Brockman says. Or as Sutskever puts it: “the wine was secondary to the talk.”

Many of these researchers liked the idea, but they were also wary of making the leap. In an effort to break the cycle, Brockman picked the ten researchers he wanted the most and invited them to spend a Saturday getting wined, dined, and cajoled at a winery in Napa Valley. For Brockman, even the drive into Napa served as a catalyst for the project. “An underrated way to bring people together are these times where there is no way to speed up getting to where you’re going,” he says. “You have to get there, and you have to talk.” And once they reached the wine country, that vibe remained. “It was one of those days where you could tell the chemistry was there,” Brockman says. Or as Sutskever puts it: “the wine was secondary to the talk.”

By the end of the day, Brockman asked all ten researchers to join the lab, and he gave them three weeks to think about it. By the deadline, nine of them were in. And they stayed in, despite those big offers from the giants of Silicon Valley. “They did make it very compelling for me to stay, so it wasn’t an easy decision,” Sutskever says of Google, his former employer. “But in the end, I decided to go with OpenAI, partly of because of the very strong group of people and, to a very large extent, because of its mission.”

Source [ Wired ]