- Jack Clark was a reporter at Bloomberg when I was an editor there.
- He told me he was quitting to join OpenAI in 2016.
- I told him that was a terrible idea. The rest is history.
In 2016, Jack Clark walked up to me in Bloomberg’s San Francisco newsroom and asked if we could go for a walk. As an editor , it’s often not good when one of your reporters makes a request like this.
Sure enough, as we sat on a bench looking over the bay, Jack told me he was quitting to join a nonprofit called OpenAI .
I said this was a terrible idea. OpenAI was less than a year old at the time and was still a relatively obscure AI research group. Its major claim to fame was Elon Musk ‘s (uneven) financial support…