From AlphaGo to ChatGPT: How Sam Altman Outran Google in the AI Race

It was a move that shocked the world, but it didn’t happen on a rocket launchpad or in a sports stadium. It unfolded on a 19x19 grid, the ancient board of the game Go. In 2016, Google’s artificial intelligence, AlphaGo, defeated 18-year-old world champion Lee Sedol. The machine had conquered what was considered the final frontier of human intellect.

Go is not chess. While chess is the game of kings, Go is the game of gods. Its complexity is mind-bending. After the first two moves in chess, there are 400 possible positions. In Go, there are over 129,000. In fact, there are more possible games of Go than there are atoms in the entire known universe. For decades, experts believed a machine could never master its intuitive depth. Yet, in 2016, it did.

Google’s DeepMind team had just pulled off the greatest AI demonstration in history. They had the talent, the data, and a war chest of $90 billion. The path to dominating the future of intelligence seemed paved. But then, something strange happened. Google hesitated. And in that moment of corporate caution, the entire trajectory of technological history was rewritten.

The Breakthrough That Google Buried

In 2017, eight researchers within Google published a research paper with a deceptively simple title: “Attention Is All You Need.” It contained the blueprint for the “transformer architecture,” a revolutionary AI model.

Before transformers, AI had a severe case of short-term memory loss. It processed words one by one, forgetting the beginning of a sentence by the time it reached the end. The transformer changed everything. It allowed AI to analyze all words in a sentence simultaneously, understanding context and relationships with human-like precision. It was the key to true language comprehension.

Google had invented the engine for the AI revolution. And then, it left it in the garage.

The Paralysis of a Giant

Why would a company built on “moonshot” projects shy away from its own greatest innovation? The answer lies in the burdens of being a $500 billion empire.

1. The Fear of Failure: Google’s business is built on trust. Billions rely on its search results daily. Executives were terrified. What if their AI chatbot gave racist, dangerous, or misleading advice? A single misstep could trigger a global backlash, congressional hearings, and a stock market crash. The headlines wrote themselves: “Google’s AI Causes Crisis.”
2. The Cannibalization Conundrum: This was the deeper, more existential fear. Google’s revenue — $95 billion a year — flowed from search advertising. If people could simply ask an AI a question and get a perfect answer, why would they ever “Google” again? Launching a revolutionary AI product meant potentially destroying their own legendary business model.

So, Google did what safe corporations do: it published papers, won academic accolades, and moved cautiously. It prioritized protecting its present over claiming the future.

The Rebels in a San Francisco Office

Meanwhile, in a modest San Francisco office, a group of outsiders was watching. Led by a young entrepreneur named Sam Altman, OpenAI was originally a non-profit “dream team” assembled in 2015 by Altman, Elon Musk, and others to counter Google’s looming AI monopoly.

Their journey was far from easy. Musk departed after a fight for control, taking promised funding with him. OpenAI was bleeding cash, facing computational costs that were doubling every few months. They were on the brink of collapse, saved only by a controversial pivot to a “capped-profit” model and, ultimately, a lifesaving partnership with Microsoft.

Microsoft’s billions provided the fuel Google had but was afraid to use. Unburdened by a legacy search business and with a “bias for action,” Altman’s team did what Google would not: they shipped a product.

The iPhone Moment of AI

In November 2022, while Google was still refining its safeguards, OpenAI launched ChatGPT to the public. The world responded instantly. It was an “iPhone moment” — an intuitive, powerful technology that everyone suddenly understood they needed. ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history.

Google’s hesitation had created a vacuum, and OpenAI rushed in to fill it. The company that owned the breakthrough was now playing catch-up.

The Unfinished Story

The lesson is a classic tale of innovation: incumbents are often paralyzed by their own success, while agile outsiders, with nothing to lose and everything to gain, can change the world.

Today, the race is fiercer than ever. Google has unleashed Gemini, and other rivals like Claude and DeepSeek are close behind. OpenAI, despite its meteoric rise, faces immense pressure and financial challenges.

The question is no longer if AI will redefine our world, but who will lead that charge. The story of OpenAI’s ascent is a powerful reminder that in the realm of technology, the future doesn’t always belong to the strongest or the richest. Sometimes, it belongs to the boldest. And in 2022, Sam Altman and his team were the only ones brave enough to press “launch.”