A.I. Belongs to the Capitalists Now

What happened at OpenAI over the past five days could be described in many ways: A juicy boardroom drama, a tug of war over one of America’s biggest start-ups, a clash between those who want A.I. to progress faster and those who want to slow it down.

But it was, most importantly, a fight between two dueling visions of artificial intelligence.

In one vision, A.I. is a transformative new tool, the latest in a line of world-changing innovations that includes the steam engine, electricity and the personal computer, and that, if put to the right uses, could usher in a new era of prosperity and make gobs of money for the businesses that harness its potential.

In another vision, A.I. is something closer to an alien life form — a leviathan being summoned from the mathematical depths of neural networks — that must be restrained and deployed with extreme caution in order to prevent it from taking over and killing us all.

With the return of Sam Altman on Tuesday to OpenAI, the company whose board fired him as chief executive last Friday, the battle between these two views appears to be over.