Paranoia is as natural to Silicon Valley as lip fillers are to Los Angeles. In the Bay Area, you can't throw a rock without hitting a startup founder convinced everyone is out to steal his ideas or poach his staff — a state of mind reaffirmed by the fact that sometimes, people very much are trying to rip off their competitors.

Until the last few years, OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, seemed above that fracas. Altman's sanguine predictions about artificial general intelligence (AGI), a benchmark at which AI reaches would human smarts, didn't feel like a money grab — his company was a nonprofit dedicated to building AGI safely, and making money was beside the point.

But that relaxed buoyancy is long gone. In its wake has come a frenzied attempt by OpenAI to abandon its nonprofit status and

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