OpenAI is on a path of certain failure relative to Google. There obviously needs to be immediate and dramatic action or everyone except for Google will be consigned to irrelevance.

It seems to me that OpenAI today is burning cash and that the funding model cannot reach the scale to seriously compete with Google (an 800B company). If you can't seriously compete but continue to do research in open, you might in fact be making things worse and helping them out 'for free', because any advances are fairly easy for them to copy and immediately incorporate, at scale.

The most promising option I can think of would be for OpenAI to attach to Tesla as its cash cow. I believe attachments to other large suspects (e.g. Apple? Amazon?) would fail due to an incompatible company DNA. Tesla already built the 'first stage' of the rocket with the whole supply chain of Model 3 and its onboard computer. The 'second stage' would be a full self-driving solution based on large-scale neural network training, which OpenAI expertise could significantly help accelerate. I cannot see anything else that has the potential to reach sustainable Google-scale capital within a decade.

Either we fix things and my engagement increases a lot or we don't and I will drop to near zero and publicly reduce my association. I will not be in a situation where the perception of my influence and time doesn't match the reality. — Elon Musk, forwarding Andrej Karpathy's analysis, January–February 2018