When Elon Musk told Sam Altman that OpenAI is on path of certain failure vs Google as…
On the last day of January 2018, Elon Musk sent a chart to Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever. No lengthy preamble. Just a blunt takeaway: DeepMind and Google Brain were dominating AI research, and OpenAI was falling behind. “OpenAI is on a path of certain failure relative to Google,” Musk wrote. That warning—detailed in Sebastian Mallaby’s The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence, excerpted in Colossus magazine—landed nearly eight years ago. It reads differently today.By December 2025, it was Altman sending the alarming memo. He declared a company-wide “code red” to fix ChatGPT, shaken by a surging Google Gemini and a fast-growing Anthropic eating into OpenAI’s enterprise lead. The Wall Street Journal first reported the memo’s contents. The roles had completely reversed.
