In 2023, Ilya Sutskever, one of the co-founders of OpenAI and the main scientist behind ChatGPT, was going through a personal and professional crisis. Even though OpenAI was leading the AI race and ChatGPT was a huge success, Sutskever seemed deeply worried.
He believed that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—a super-powerful AI that’s smarter than humans—was coming very soon. And he wasn’t just excited about it. He was scared.
The Bunker Plan
At a meeting with new researchers, Sutskever said something shocking:
“We’re definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI.”
Why? Because once AGI is real, he believed governments and other powerful groups would fight to control it.
So the top scientists would need a safe place to hide.
The “bunker” became a symbol of just how serious—and strange—things had gotten inside OpenAI.
Some people who worked with him said he even talked about AGI like it would cause a kind of “rapture”—a total transformation of the world, maybe even the end of it as we know it.
OpenAI’s Big Shift
OpenAI was started with good intentions. It was meant to share AI with the world, stay nonprofit, and make sure the benefits of AGI helped everyone.
But as the technology got more powerful, the company needed more money. Elon Musk left. Sam Altman changed the company’s structure so it could make money while still being “mission-driven.”
That’s when things started to change.
Now, instead of sharing everything openly, OpenAI started keeping secrets. They stopped releasing their biggest models.
They focused more on business deals and growth. Safety became a concern—but it was often in the hands of the same people pushing for faster progress.
Fear vs. Growth
Inside the company, a major split was forming.
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Sutskever was deeply concerned about AGI’s risks and wanted to slow down and focus on safety.
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Altman was focused on growing fast, launching new products, and making OpenAI more powerful.
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This tension eventually exploded in late 2023 when Sutskever helped remove Altman from the company—only to reverse it a few days later in a strange and dramatic turn of events.
OpenAI is building the most powerful AI systems in the world. But its leaders don’t always agree on what’s right. Some believe AGI will save the world. Others fear it could destroy it.
This mix of ambition, fear, and secrecy is at the heart of the chaos inside OpenAI.
